Language, Consciousness and Intelligence?
The Age of Intelligent Machines: Can Machines Think?(Dennett): "No conceivable computer could overpower a combinatorial explosion with sheer speed and size. Since the problem areas addressed by artificial intelligence are veritable minefields of combinatorial explosion, and since it has often proved difficult to find any solution to a problem that avoids them, there is considerable plausibility in Newell and Simon's proposal that avoiding combinatorial explosion (by any means at all) be viewed as one of the hallmarks of intelligence."
Turing Test: 50 Years Later (A. P. Saygin 1 , I. Cicekli 2 & V. Akman)
"after 50 years, all that we have are some very rudimentary chatbots (Section 6),
serendipitous FSAs (Bringsjord, 1994), unrealizable Chinese rooms (Searle, 1980)
and Aunt Bubbles machines (Block, 1981, 1995)."
"We have failed to fulfill Turing’s prophecy in the first 50 years of the TT.We should
admit that we have a difficult task at hand."
Psychologism and Behaviorism (Ned Block 1981): "So long as the programmers have done their job properly, such a machine will have the capacity to emit a sensible sequence of verbal outputs, whatever the verbal inputs, and hence it is intelligent according to the neo-Turing Test conception of intelligence. But actually, the machine has the intelligence of a toaster. "
"The trouble with the neo-Turing Test conception of intelligence (and its predecessors) is precisely that it does not allow us to distinguish between behavior that reflects a machine's own intelligence, and behavior that, reflects only the intelligence of the machine's programmers. As I suggested, only a partly etiological notion of intelligent behavior will do the trick"
Final draft for Evolution: From Molecules to Ecosystems, (Daniel Dennett): "Now if the amazing Dr. Frankenstein had actually anticipated all this activity down to its finest grain at the most turbulent and chaotic level, and had hand-designed Spakesheare's virtual past, and all its search machinery, to yield just this product, Spamlet, then Dr. Frankenstein would be, once again, the author of Spamlet, but also, in a word, God."
In other words, even Dennett concedes that the hyper-text Turing-Test passer is
not intelligent.
"Who beat Garry Kasparov, the reigning World Chess Champion? Not Murray Campbell or any of his IBM team. Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Deep Blue designs better chess games than any of them can design. None of them can author a winning game against Kasparov. Deep Blue can. "
Unfortunately for Prof. Dennett, his position is over-stated. My father and I, both independently mediocre chess players once played Chessmaster, and together could achieve a level considerably higher than either of us together. Could we not imagine that the performance of Deep Blue was just such an aggregate of the chess skills of its creators?
Which demonstrates intelligence: the agent that conceives and formalizes the algorithm, or the agent that executes it? (Shades of the Chinese Room!) In my chess play, I would be delighted to be able to execute computations sufficient to extrapolate my strategies. Alas, I am unable to do so. However, I have no doubt that a computer that could execute those computations could aid in my level of chess performance. And this computer would NOT(!) be demonstrating any intelligence: it would simply be iterating, measuring, extending, and comparing moves according to the processes that I, the programmer have conceived and formalized.
William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina (MIT Press, 2000):
"Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, the intellectual spectator sport of the last four decades, implies an innate brain circuitry for syntax. That opens up an evolutionary can of worms, suggesting a large step up to human-level language abilities – one without the useful-in-themselves intermediate steps usually associated with Darwinian gradualism. That macromutations were suggested is only one example of the deus ex machina quality of most attempts to explain the origins of language."
"These three things - language, evolution, and the brain - it seems to me, are interlocking. ... If you want to know how language ... operates via brain mechanisms, you've got to know exactly what it's like - how it differs from bee dances and chimp calls. ... All three areas of knowledge should be feeding one another, but they're not. And that’s the king-size hole in our understanding of ourselves that I’m hoping, between us, we might be able to plug up a bit in the next month."
In effect, the book
Lingua ex Machina is a "brainstorming session (reviewer T. Deacon)".
"But as Ernst Mayr once said, most species are not intelligent, which suggests 'that high intelligence is not at all favored by natural selection' - or that it's very hard to achieve. So our look at bootstrapping syntax also needs to keep in mind this more general problem of finding indirect ways of achieving intelligence. "
"language is just our best example of the whole range of higher intellectual functions. Our
lingua ex machina probably needs to be able to handle creative shaping up of quality (for instance, figuring out what to do with the leftovers in the refrigerator), long-range planning, procedural games, and even music."
Objections to computationalism and arguments against AI ( artificial intelligence ): "There are a number of arguments against computationalism . Algorithms do not contain within themselves any meaning. For example, the following two statements reduce to exactly the same algorithm within the memory of a computer
(i) IF RoomLength * RoomWidth > CarpetArea THEN NeedMoreCarpet = TRUE
(ii) IF Audience * TicketPrice > HireOfVenue THEN AvoidedBankruptcy = TRUE
Such considerations have led critics of computationalism to claim that algorithms can only contain syntax, not semantics [SEARLE 1997]. Hence computers can never understand their subject matter. All assignments of meaning to their inputs, internal states and outputs have to be defined from outside the system."
"According to the computationalist view this 'Mother of all Algorithms' must exist as an algorithm in the programmer's brain, though why and how such a thing evolved is rather difficult to imagine. It would certainly have conferred no selective advantage to our ancestors until the present generation (even so, do programmers outreproduce normal people?).
The proof of philosophical AI would be to program the Mother of all Algorithms on a computer. At present no one has the slightest clue of how to even start to go about producing such a thing. "
Oliver Sacks: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales
"Of course, the brain
is a machine and a computer--everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well--and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also. If this is missing, we become computer-like, as Dr. P was. And, by the same token, if we delete feeling and judging, the personal, from the cognitive sciences, we reduce
them to something as defective as Dr. P. --and we reduce
our apprehension of the concrete and real." (p.20)
"charming, intelligent, memoryless Jimmie G. (
The Lost Mariner)" with Korsakov's syndrome (severe retrograde amnesia) is a special case and eliminates the "now" argument against the hypertext Turing-Test solver.
The Turing Test Is Not A Trick: Turing Indistinguishability Is A Scientific Criterion: "You don't have to be able to define intelligence (knowledge, understanding) in order to see that people have it and today's machines don't. Nor do you need a definition to see that once you can no longer tell them apart, you will no longer have any basis for denying of one what you affirm of the other."
Brain Function: "The cerebellum helps to control and coordinate familiar movements. When a person is learning a new activity, such as riding a bike, the cerebrum directs muscles to move. Once the activity has been learned, the cerebellum takes over. "
The "training" of the cerebellum is an intelligent activity. Once the cerebellum has been trained, the intelligence is abstracted.
Overview (Introduction to AI):
"Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is the attempt to build intelligent computer systems"
question-begging, to say the least.
Exploring Plato's Dialogues: Phaedrus 274b-277a (Jowett):
"writing is unfortunately like painting"
"the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image"
(ps.-?) Plato's Seventh Letter: "For this reason no man of intelligence will venture to express his philosophical views in language, especially not in language that is unchangeable, which is true of that which is set down in written characters."
