THOUGHTS AND QUESTIONS ABOUT AI,CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE TURING TEST
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Unseen 7 years, 6 months ago.
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I see no reason that the machine (animals are basically an organic chemistry machine) bringing about consciousness needs to (be) biological in order to do so.
Animals are merely meat robots.
Maybe they don’t need to be, but the behavior of the machinery we know that can attempt to simulate biological intelligence is due to simply manipulating symbols a la The Chinese Room.
Defining consciousness as the experience we have of ourselves each day between waking up and going to sleep is useless when trying to identify consciousness in others. e.g. You couldn’t use that definition to show that I am conscious. So, I reiterate, in the absence of a definition of consciousness, how can you tell consciousness apart from a simulation of consciousness?
Well, that is exactly the problem with the Turing test, isn’t it. A successful simulation of human behavior only proves that the simulation was successful and only during the test. Human beings exhibit human behavior all day long while alive and conscious. The Turing test gets us no closer to understanding human intelligence or identifying consciousness.
As for defining consciousness, I stick with Searle’s, since it’s about as close as anyone I’m aware of has gotten to defining how we use the term in everyday life.
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This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Unseen.
“How does “complete” fit into your question?” – by “complete”, I mean a state that has sufficient attributes of “consciousness” to be called “consciousness”. Something which has all the essential attributes. If one of those attributes is missing, it’s not consciousness.
“It’s the very nature of the subconscious that we are unaware of it at the time we are having it, right? We become aware of subconscious goings on later on through reflection on what happened.”
– if the subconscious is a part of consciousness, yet we are unaware of what is unconscious, in the subconscious, then this shows that “consciousness” and “awareness” are not the same thing.
I don’t claim that the subconscious is “part of consciousness.” Quite the opposite. It’s something we can surmise on reflection, but we can’t experience the subconscious directly. We even experience dreams directly but there is no direct experience of the subconscious. Hence, it’s not and can never be part of consciousness. Perhaps the term “subconscious” is misleading by dint of having the word “conscious” in it, but it means literally “beneath consciousness.” It’s not like “subbasement” where the subbasement is also a basement. It’s more like “subtext” where a subtext is not in any way shape or form a text, but is rather something not expressed in the text.
“As for defining consciousness, I stick with Searle’s, since it’s about as close as anyone I’m aware of has gotten to defining how we use the term in everyday life.”
– what is Searle’s definition?
In a telephone interview on NPR, Searle defined consciousness in a way that distinguishes between a common sense/ordinary language definition and a truly scientific definition: “…all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness. It begins in the morning when you wake up from a dream of asleep [sic]. And it goes on all day until you fall asleep or die or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness on this definition. Now, that’s the common sense definition. That’s our target. If you’re not talking about that, you’re not talking about consciousness.”
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This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by
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