Subject: (urth) 5HC : Chinese boxes or tea chests?

From: Jim Raylor <rjraylor at yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 07:47:50 +0000

Searle's argument was that the guy in the room who
manipulated the symbols had no real knowledge of the
Chinese language, just the rules for manipulating the
symbols.
It could be argued that all language users 'merely'
know how to manipulate the symbols without a full
awareness of their meanings.
I think this when I use words like 'Notwithstanding'
and 'Nevertheless'.
I sometimes wonder if interpreters at the UN (for
example) pay any heed to the meaning of the messages
they translate, beyond what is required to translate
the words.
For example an eccentric translator could perversely
translate a book by cutting it into individual
sentences, translating each one in random order and
then reassembling them in the original order. 

I seem to recall a program which regularly fooled
people into thinking it was a client-centred
psychotherapist.

How do you feel about a program which regularly fooled
people into thinking it was a client-centred psychotherapist?

=====
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From: David Lebling <dlebling at hyraxes.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 08:06:09 +0000

> people into thinking it was a client-centred psychotherapist?

Joe Weizenbaum wept.

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 11:43:27 +0000

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 15:47:12 +0000 (GMT), Jim Raylor
> Chinese language, just the rules for manipulating the

This is a significant point, because the neurons in my brain 
have no real knowledge of the English language,  just  the 
rules for manipulating the symbols. Thus, the neurons do 
not "know English." But _I_  appear to.

Similarly, the man in the Chinese Room does not Chinese, 
but the system-as-a-whole appears to.  To say "The Room 
does not know Chinese," Searle must, _at a minimum_,

1. Define what it means to "know Chinese,"
2. Propose an empirical test for the definition proposed
    in #1, and
3. Demonstrate (from hypothesis, since no such Room
    exists) that the Room does not fit the definition 
    proposed in #1.

Searle has not, to the best of my knowledge, proposed 
either a definition of "knowing Chinese" or an empirical 
test for determining whether the Room actually knows 
Chinese. He has instead relied on his readers' paralogical 
emotional response to assure us that it does not. But that 
does not mean that it does not.

> people into thinking it was a client-centred

That would be "Eliza." It didn't really fool very many
people or for very long.

--Dan'l

-- 
"We're going to sit on Scorsese's head"
     -- The Goodfeathers

---

From: James Wynn <thewynns at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 12:43:04 +0000

>does not mean that it does not.

Yes, but to be fair Turing's criteria is just as subjective. Roughly, "can a
computer succeed in impersonating a human person well enough to fool
humans." Where is the "control" here? Mr. Raylor has brought up an excellent
point: What if a computer can succeed in fooling someone that it is
something we KNOW it is not? That would be a useful control, I think. Is
successful mimicry really the final criteria for personhood for a machine?
>>From bird's point of view, many bugs succeed in fooling them that they are
thorns, leaves and sticks. To the mother bird, the coo-coo is her child.

Another possible control that someone has pointed out is that a computer
conceivably might be conscious and might think and NOT seem at all human in
its responses. Such a computer would not test positive for the Turing test.
I used to subscribe to AI Magazine but I'm not much of an authority on this.
How does the Turing criteria eliminate for an especially good mimic (to
bring this discussion back to V.R.T)?

Wolfe, cleverly, has upped the ante on the Turing test by making the
"simulation" much more elaborate:

1) Mr. Million (referred to a "simulation" as a deliberate foil to V.R.T's
"simulation") and Rose and the Whorl gods who are much the same thing in
another form

2) The Lemur clan and Potto (are the chem bodies whose bodies they have
commandeered walkie-talkies as they apparently intended or are they only
simulating the psyches of the Ayuntamiento?)

3) What does it mean that the souls of the inhumi look very similar to the
physical bodies of their hosts?

~ Crush

---

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 12:53:25 +0000

The two of you are probably thinking of a) Parry; an improved Eliza
which was a lot more effective and b) some experiments where
unsuspecting students talked to a program similar to Eliza via a
terminal and never suspected anything (that is, they were not told to
apply all their critical spirit to it, like they would in a real
Turing test.).

~Maru
Microsoft delenda est.

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 11:43:20 -0800, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
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---

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 12:55:39 +0000

Of course they do: context matters.  When translating it's not a
matter of just swapping syntactic structures, grammar, and voabulary-
if it was, machine translation woulda been licked a long time ago. 
Those are low level rules- there are rules that govern how the story
acts, and how the meaning units interact. Contextual rules, not just
syntactic rules, if that makes sense.

~Maru
Microsoft delenda est.

---

From: David Lebling <dlebling at hyraxes.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 14:05:43 +0000

> That would be "Eliza." It didn't really fool very many

Indeed it was Eliza, written by Joseph Weizenbaum. For a long discussion of
the reaction to the program, see his book "Computer Power and Human Reason,"
a passionate critique of "strong AI."

Eliza was widely distributed as "Doctor," which imitated a Rogerian
psychotherapist. Parry imitated (in my opinion in an even cruder way than
Eliza's effort) a paranoid schizophrenic. There is a classic dialog between
the two which is easy to Google for (try "parry" and "doctor").

It does not take long to see that either is not human, or able to understand
English in even a very crude way, but many people did not, for various
reasons, most generally from the social surround of how the program was
presented. If the source of the answers is described as a person, many
people will believe that it is in fact a person, until the evidence to the
contrary is overwhelming.

What lessons about 5HC we may draw from this experience I hesitate to guess.

-- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha

---

From: James Wynn <thewynns at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 14:44:44 +0000

>>Yes, but to be fair Turing's criteria is just as subjective.
>
>Ummm, no. It _is_ subjective - or, rather, it is based on subjective
>judgments - but it provides a definition (admittedly, an ostensive
>rather than a descriptive definition), and a way of testing for
>whether that definition has been met. Searle (to the best of
>my memory) does neither.

But since a camouflage device can always get better and better (particularly
since our A.I.'s creators can experiment to discover the chinks in its
disguise) it is a standard that can likely be met without ever addressing
whether the definition is valid (just as the mother bird's criteria for
whether the coo-coo is her child is that it was hatched in her nest.
Searle's analogy begs all sorts of questions, but it is a set up so that the
definitions are implicit: the person in the box represents the expert system
A.I. and it "acts" without "thinking". Remember, the original question that
Turing was addressing was "can a computer 'think'?".

>>Roughly, "can a computer succeed in impersonating a human
>>person well enough to fool humans." Where is the "control" here?
>
>Read Turing's article. The "imitation game" was to be played by
>two players, a human and a computer, with a second human
>judging between them - "which is the human and which is the
>computer?" The test is, of course, blind - the judge doesn't know
>which player is which. (In a really rigorous test, I would suggest that
>runs be done with all possible combinations (not only human vs
>computer but human vs human and computer vs computer.) Both
>players are trying to convince the judge that they are the human.
>Thus, the responses of the human player provides the control to
>which the responses of the computer player are compared.

That comes out to little more than an opinion poll if one assume that humans
are generally equal in their ability to be duped. Not much of a "control".
On the other hand, even if a computer were conscious, a computer
programmer who designed such systems would probably always be able
to identify certain algorithms to recognize it.

~ Crush

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 16:42:09 +0000

>awareness of their meanings.

Well, kinda. If you did make an argument that all language users 'merely' 
know how to manipulate symbols, then you would need a matching conception of 
"meaning". (Such theories exist). In such an argument, there's simply isn't 
any "deeper meaning" for language users to lack awareness of.

>they translate, beyond what is required to translate

If they didn't, they wouldn't be useful translators. Ambiguities don't map 
one-to-one in different language; in order to know which French word to use 
in a translation of an ambiguous English word, you have to work out the 
probable meaning of the expression it occurs in first.

Also the vast majority of typical communication is also not quite literal. 
Most of the time you intend to express something more than, or something 
different from, the literal meanings of the words you use. Preserving this 
in a word-for-word translation, even without ambiguities, would be unlikely.

Translation is hard.

>people into thinking it was a client-centred psychotherapist?

I think this was Dr. Sbaitso, although Dr. Sbaitso might well just be a 
variant of Eliza (Dan'l's suggestion).

Civet

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:33:10 +0000

> >does not mean that it does not.

Well, hold up for a second. Empirical tests aren't necessary, because this 
is a thought problem, and in thought problems you can actually *stipulate* 
such things; of course, this means that what you end up with is a conclusion 
that a hypothesis is either logically consistent or inconsistent, it doesn't 
mean that an actual instance of what you describe in the thought problem can 
or will happen.

I think it was Searle's intention to stipulate the layout of the Room such 
that not only does it not "know Chinese", but that it *does appear* to "know 
Chinese". Unfortunately the layout he describes doesn't really fit the bill, 
for one thing. But really there are a multitude of problems here. Granting 
that he does have a definition of what it is to understand a language 
(presumably laid out somewhere in the large body of work he's done in the 
philosophy of language), for example, doesn't necessarily compel you to 
agree with that definition. And so on and so on and so on.

Crush said:
>something we KNOW it is not? That would be a useful control, I think.

And I think this was Searle's intention in trying to lay out the Chinese 
Room the way he did: to raise this as a logical possibility. Personally I 
don't think he succeeded with his example, but even if he did succeed, what 
are the implications? Well, to start with it would mean that obviously you 
can't *know* that something is intelligent just because it behaves 
"intelligently". And if this is the case then a strict behaviorist would 
have a problem. (It is unclear to me but I get the general impression that 
Searle thinks that Turing's position is necessarily behaviorist, and I don't 
think it really is.)

>Is successful mimicry really the final criteria for personhood for a 
>machine?

This is something I have been trying to get at here. There are two questions 
to be answered, an "is" question and an "ought" question. If Searle is 
correct the "is" question (is the machine intelligent?) can't be answered by 
examination of behavior alone (or possibly can't be answered at all). 
However, "personhood" is really an "ought" question. How ought a machine 
that appears to behave intelligently be treated, what rights should it have, 
etc?

I would say that Turing is really answering this "ought" question: a machine 
that appears to be conscious should be granted personhood even if you're 
unsure of the truth of whether it "is" intelligent. And I think it is even 
more clear that this is the position that Wolfe holds with the example of 
Rose.

---

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:40:51 +0000

I think what he said is even more fundamental than that-(stop me if
I've said this before). I think what Turing is saying, is that if you
can't tell the difference in output, can't make statistically
meaningful differentiation, than you have no choice but to grant it
personhood, because you will *never* find a better method, a better
test.

~Maru
Now here's an interesting thought problem- postulate a vast group of
robots who can pass the Turing Test, and mimic a bright, inventive
young engineer so well nobody can tell the difference through a
screen, and who are also reasonably physically handy.  Suppose every
real 'human' died off and all that is left are robots w/0 "real
counsciousness". What would happen if they discovered an asteroid
coming, and the only possible way of survival was to blow it up with a
nuke? Suppose further that they made like a human, solving all
technical problems, and an advanced alien civilization came by
impressed by what they had done.  Would the aliens accord the robots
'personhood' and would they be right or wrong?

On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 01:32:45 +0000, Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com> wrote:
....

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:09:02 +0000

Maru said:
>Suppose further that they made like a human, solving all

You've stipulated they don't have "real consciousness", but the important 
unknown is: do the aliens have the ability to tell the difference, or if 
they are uncertain, do they have an estimate of probability for the robots 
having "real consciousness"?

For fun, a few possibilities:

Kantian deontological Martians - treat the robots as persons if there is 
even the tiniest finite chance of them being conscious, because any attempt 
to universally apply a maxim which treats a being with a finite chance of 
being a person as a non-person will eventually use at least one person as a 
means and thus violates the Categorical Imperative.

Utilitarian Neptunians - attempt to calculate the relative utilities of 
treating the robots as persons vs. taking advantage of them, weighted for 
relative probability that each is the case. If unable to accurately estimate 
the utilities, they spin around in a circle three times chanting "Do the 
done thing" and then ask the Martians what to do.

Hobbesian Plutonians - don't care whether the robots are persons or not. 
They treat the robots as persons because cooperation is to their advantage.

Venusian virtue-ethicists - treat the robots as persons even if they know 
they're not conscious, because it reinforces their virtue of humane 
compassion.

Mercurial relativists - Well, do the robots consider *themselves* persons? 
You have to respect the robots' position on the matter. Unless, of course, 
the current culture on Mercury has developed anti-robot values, in which 
case who could blame them for destroying or enslaving the robots? Or, 
alternately, the more class-conscious Marxists among them elevate them as 
the ultimate expression of the proletariat and elect the robots to be their 
leaders. But they might change their minds later. Or do all of the above, 
because after all there are no wrong answers.

---

From: Nathan Spears <spearofsolomon at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 06:47:21 +0000

I'm not sure I get the "have to nuke the asteriod" bit.  If the computers ran off
solar energy than it would be a legimate problem, I suppose, although not for the
reasons they were aware of.  But don't you think that an entity which has
consciousness needs to be "self-aware" enough to make real decisions concerning its
own future?  Or were you saying that the computers destroyed the asteriod out of a
legitimate sense of self-preservation?

Chris, I would have gone with Platonic Plutonians: do the computers aspire to the
Form of Personhood?

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---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:39:19 +0000

Just as a side note:

Differentiate between behaviorism[1] and behaviorism[2]. (Sorry, my 
email doesn't do subscripts.)

Behaviorism[1] refers to the epistemological position that, since we
do not have access to the content of the consciousness of a subject
of study (even if the subject describes the content of her consciousness,
we have to allow for inaccuracy, lies, etc.), the only aspect of the
subject we can actually study is her behavior (including statements
about the content of her consciousness, etc.).

Behviorism[2] refers to the ontological position that no such thing 
as "consciousness" exists.

Behaviorism[1] seems to-me a legitimate and scientific position.

Behaviorism[2] seems to-me to have been concocted as a parody
of behaviorism[1].

However, some extreme behaviorists[1] often act and speak as if
they actually believed in behaviorism[2].

The point of all this? Turing's test works in the scientific realm
of behaviorism[1], not the essentially religous (because 
incapable of empirical test) realm of behaviorism[2].

Searle's Chinese Room gedankenexperiment works in the
space between behaviorism[1] and behaviorism[2].

What I mean by this:

Turing proposes an open test and says, "If we obtained
a certain type of results, the most resaonable conclusion
would be that the machine in question was conscious." 
He leaves the question open of whether the conclusion 
would actually be true, or whether such a result might 
actually occur.

Searle proposes a much more limited test and says, "No 
matter what the results, we must conclude that the Room 
does not 'know Chinese,' because we know _a priori_ that 
it does not."

--Dan'l

---

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 10:29:53 +0000

What I meant was something along these lines: ' Suppose further that
the robots ran into some difficult, advanced, hard-to-solve
life-threatening problem. Let's call it X.  Then the robots solve X
just like the humans would have, if they were still around (because
the robots are so very good at imitating what humans would do). Then
some advanced aliens come...' etc.

~Maru
Microsoft delenda est.

---

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 10:35:54 +0000

Ahh, now that depends on your philosphical position. If you go with
Penrose and suchlike, then all you have to do is see if they pass the
Turing Test and also run on the right substrate.  But if you take the
Strong AI position, and argue that intelligence and counsciousness are
independent of the physical instantiation, that what is relevant is
the pattern, then they have to fall back on observations, to what are
essentially variations on the Turing Test.
I'll leave out how every thought about reality is but a probability,
since it isn't really relevant.
But you left out the Bayesian Beta Regulisians:   Examine carefully
their actions, material culture, and the results of various tests you
carry out. Weight them all into the formula, obtain your best
probability, then evaluate expected utility and go from there.

~Maru
Microsoft delenda est.

---

From: Nathan Spears <spearofsolomon at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 10:38:48 +0000

But are the similarities superficial?  That is, are they solving problems for
themselves using human methods, or for the same reasons humans would have?  Do they
believe that they are organic creatures dependent on oxygen and sunlight for
survival, or are they "aware" (even if that only means, "they factor into their
problem-solving the fact that they are machines") that they are machines mimicking
human thought-processes?

---

From: James Wynn <thewynns at earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 11:14:29 +0000

>Behaviorism[2] seems to-me to have been concocted as a parody

I don't know the whole history of Behaviorism[2], but wasn't it most
popularized in B.F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom & Dignity"? He is hardly a
fringe personality in the science of Behavorialism. Skinner argued that
problems of human overpopulation could be handled by the emerging
'technologies of behavior" which in order to be fully developed had to be
sundered from the notion of human "free will", that an "automaton" resides
within us (as opposed to the understanding that we are the sum of Nature and
Nurture). There are lots of critics of Skinner (count me with them), but
none that I know of do so with empirical data.

>does not 'know Chinese,' because we know _a priori_ that

I agree with this. The Searle's conclusion (and definitions) are implicit in
his thought experiment. But the argument against him always comes down to:
"Well, how do you know that *humans* "think" in the superlative manner
Searle's analogy  seems to presume they do?" But that sounds like a tilt
toward B.F. Skinner to me.

I think Wolfe has posed a much more complex scenario. Rather than building
his simulated personalities from scratch, he has them imprinted directly
from a human pattern and says "Are they people?" Lemur says "no". He calls
them 'ghosts'. Sort of moving, monuments to people long dead. (And then he
found out that HE was such a monument as well). Mr. Million seems to agree
with Lemur.

Rose say "yes", because she already WAS a person.  She's not a fraud,
mimicking personality.

V.R.T. is trying to *become* Marsch but does not seem to have succeeded
because Number Five and his jailers seem to see right through him....but if
he got away with it, would he BE Marsch? Does this question not strike to
the heart of the Turing "imitation game"?

~ Crush

---

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 11:23:40 +0000

There's a relevant idea in computer science which goes 'a perfect emulation 
*is* the thing being emulated.'

~Maru

---

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 11:29:55 +0000

First, I do believe that we are reaching the (or a) heart of 5HC in 
a way I've never seen before. I wonder if anyone here can tie
"A Story" into this analysis?

Second...

Yes, Skinner is _the_ paradigmatic behaviorist. Behaviorism[2] is
very much pointed at the extreme behaviorist[1] position he takes
in books like _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ and, to a lesser 
extent, _Walden Two_. 

The key point is that Skinner, as near as I can make out, does not 
claim that "consciousness" does not happen - though he _does_
claim, if I'm not mistaken (it's been a looong time since I read S)
that there is no such "thing" - no nounish extant - as "consciousness."
Rather, he is claiming that "consciousness" is irrelevant to 
pragmatic matters (such as controlling the "population explosion"), 
which _can_ (he says) be handled by "technologies of behavior" 
that don't take "consciousness" into account. 

In this, he seems to me to fall into the same overall category as
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. - an anti-humanist. I also suggest
that this is a possible theme of 5HC, and particularly of "VRT".

--Dan'l

---

From: Iorwerth Thomas <iorweththomas at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 04:29:05 +0000

>From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>

Hmm, I think (going by conversations with a psychologist flatmate) that [1] 
is historically prior to [2]... That may be because one gets so used to a 
stance taken for the sake of scientific method that one starts to take it as 
reality (add in logical postivism, and [1] pretty much becomes equivalent to 
[2], since the only things we can talk about are scientifically provable 
things, if you're a logical positivist).   Which do you class Skinner as?

I keep coming across articles in the New Scientist that seem to be 
attempting to argue from [1] to [2].  That depresses me.

Iorwerth

---

From: Iorwerth Thomas <iorweththomas at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 04:39:06 +0000

>From: "James Wynn" <thewynns at earthlink.net>
>

>>From conversations with a psychologist friend, I get the impression that he 
vaccilated between the two (he was an epiphenomenonologist (sp?), so 
consciousness - when he believed in it - didn't matter anyway).  He 
apparently subjected his daughter to operant conditioning, but that may be 
exageration - my friend doesn't like him overmuch.

Iorwerth

---

From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 11:21:26 +0000

At the risk of terrible boredom, this is a reasonable reference:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/

Analytical behaviorism seems to go just as far back as the other kind. But 
what I would point out here is that the mere epistemic position - that 
behavior provides the only data we have to go by - is not enough to 
constitute any of these types of behaviorism, and I don't think that what is 
being referred to here as "behaviorism[1]" is really behaviorism.

To draw a parallel with physics: when studying the motion of a ball in 
space, the only data we have to go by is its position in time. Two 
scientists could entirely agree on this much. But let's say that one of 
these scientists concludes that the proper way to study the motion of the 
ball is by mathematically analyzing its motion, whereas the other insists 
that the object of inquiry should not be the mere motion of the ball itself 
but rather the action of the forces which act on the ball, and the laws of 
motion in general.

This is not meant to be a perfect analogy. But my point is that being a 
behaviorist of *any* stripe requires more than just a particular view of 
behavior as data. It requires a certain outlook as to the limits, method, 
and object of study. And to accept Turing's position I don't think you have 
to accept any variety of behaviorism.

As a side note I think that the term has tended to refer to the more radical 
versions as time has gone on at least in part because people took the 
general principles of the most extreme version and imported it into other 
arenas under the name "behaviorism". For example "linguistic behaviorism", 
something Searle was concerned with, is the notion that there is no deeper 
"meaning" than simply the set of external stimuli that would lead one to 
affirm/assert or deny a sentence. [I can only say that his arguments against 
this are much sharper, in my opinion, than the whole Chinese Room thing.] In 
any event anyone familiar with these other arenas rather than psychology is 
going to get a skewed impression of what "behaviorism" means.