urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 5, Issue 41

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 28 Jan 2005, 15:19 · from 2005-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Fri Jan 28 15:19:14 2005
Subject: (urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 5, Issue 41
In-Reply-To: <BAY102-F15FBFE80FEC922725154B786790 at phx.gbl>
References: <1f76173705012813136be35e88 at mail.gmail.com>
	<BAY102-F15FBFE80FEC922725154B786790 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1f7617370501281519fba9a0c at mail.gmail.com>

My apologies to both Turin and Civet: I had mossed the latter's
earlier mention of Searle's "Chinese Room."

I do think that the "Chinese Room" is a quibble, and a bad one 
at that: it involves a particular kind of essentialism that I don't 
have any use for, and I perceive it as a desperate attempt to 
defend the epistemologically unique status of the human "mind," 
in advance of any serious assault made on that status by (for 
example) a machine capable of winning the Imitation Game
with any regularity.

> Basically by endorsing the test you are making an ought-claim 
> (possibly of the ethical variety, although the ethical isn't the only
> type of "ought"): that, regardless of the truth behind the currently 
> impenetrable curtain, we *should* make our judgments concerning
> intelligence based on evidence of behavior. 

I don't think it's an ethical but an epistemological "ought," but I 
agree with your interpretation here. But then, what evidence - 
other than _some_ kind of behavior - is avaialable for or against 
the existence of _any_ intelligence, machine, animal,human, 
or alien?

I don't think I'm "endorsing" the test, though: I'm simply 
challenging those who think it's invalid to come up with something 
better, ideally something that doesn't rely upon intuition. (The
Turing test relies on a statistical summation of multiple people's
intuitions over many runs; the Searle-Penrose axis rely totally on
their intuition that intelligence is "something more" than massively
parallel information processing.)

> It is, granted, a short step from there to saying that the
> evidence of behavior *is* the only truth of the matter there is, 

It is in fact a huge leap: one, I gather, that some behaviorists
have made, but very few. I certainly have never encountered 
a behaviorist who would deny his or her own consciousness.

> I have often thought about the particular flaw that Dan'l identifies. 
> It seems to me that the class of sentient machines that you're saying 
> would be excluded would really be comparable, all in all, to 
> madmen.

H'mmm. No. I'm suggesting that its experiential world might be far 
more different from thine and mine than that of, say, a sociopath,
or even a catatonic: at least as different as the experiential world
of one of the "higher" animals. As far as I can tell, a sentient 
machine would operate from, at least some, entirely different 
_kinds_ of sensory input from humans, for example; nor would it
likely be bashed about by hormonally-induced "moods."

> Labeling a machine as "insane" might be quite unfair, but pragmatically
> would have to be done. A machine intelligence with perceptions and
> motivations sufficiently different from our admittedly arbitrary norm would
> be far more dangerous than any homicidal madman.

Only if it also had the ability to act upon its motivations. I see no reason
why such a machine should be granted, for example, arms or any other
manipulating appendage.

--Blattid

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

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net