steve@ztivax.UUCP (01/26/87)
/* Written 5:10 pm Jan 23, 1987 by harnad@mind in ztivax:comp.ai */
Everyone knows that there's no
AT&T to stick a pin into, and to correspondingly feel pain. You can do
that to the CEO, but we already know (modulo the TTT) that he's
conscious. You can speak figuratively, and even functionally, of a
corporation as if it were conscious, but that still doesn't make it so.
To telescope the intuitive sense
of the rebuttals: Do you believe rooms or corporations feel pain, as
we do?
--
Stevan Harnad (609) - 921 7771
{allegra, bellcore, seismo, rutgers, packard} !princeton!mind!harnad
harnad%mind@princeton.csnet
/* End of text from ztivax:comp.ai */
How do you know that AT&T doesn't feel pain? How do you know that corporations
are not conscious? People have referred to "national consciousness" (and other
consciousnesses of organisations) for a long time. The analogy works quite
well, too well for me to be certain that there is no truth to them. If neurons
are conscious, what kind of picture would they have of the consciousness of
a human? In my opinion, not much. Similarly, I cannot rule out the
possibility that corporations are also conscious. Corporations appear to act
in a conscious manner, but they do not share much experience with us neurons
(I mean humans). Therefore, we cannot do much of a Total Turing Test for
Corporations.
Harnad also suggested in another posting that he has never seen a convincing
argument that conscious interpretation is necessary to understand a given
set of objective behavior. Has he ever, I wonder, tried doing that to
human behavior? (I don't think I'm being very clear here.)
My position is this: if the conscious interpretation of a given set of
behavior is useful, then by all means interpret the behavior as conscious!
As for proving that behavior is conscious, I feel that that is impossible.
(At least for a philosopher.) For to do so would require a rigorous,
testable definition of consciousness and people (especially philosophers)
have a mystique about consciousness: if someone provides a rigorous,
testable definition for consciousness, then people will not accept it
because it is not mysterious - "it is just" something.
I'm afraid I'm not being very clear again. Consider the great numbers of
people who are very impressed about a computer learning program, and then
when they hear how it works, they say "that's not learning, that's just
optimisation [or whatever the learning algorithm is]." People have an
intuition that says things like "learning" "intelligence" and "consciousness"
are things that cannot be defined, and will reject definitions of them that
can be used for anything. This mystique has been greatly reduced over the
past few years for "intelligence", and people are wasting less and less time
arguing about whether computer programs really learn.
I suggest that the problem with "consciousness" is the same, that we reject
rigorous definitions because of our desire for a mystique. In the end, I
personally feel that the issue is not particularly important - that when it
becomes really useful to think of our programs as conscious (if it ever does)
then we will, and arguing about whether they really are conscious, especially
before we talk about them (routinely) as being conscious, is an exercise in
futility. I guess, though, that someone ought to argue against Minsky just
for the sake that he not go unchallenged.
When biologists get together, they don't waste their time trying to define
"life". No one has come up with a good definition of "life" to date. There
was a pretty good one a while back (unfortunately I don't remember all of it),
and part of it was something about converting energy for its benefit. Some
clever person showed that a rock satisfied this definition of life! When
sunlight falls on a rock, the rock warms up - (I forgot too much of this
anecdote, I don't remember why that is in the rock's benefit). When biologists
do talk about the meaning of (I mean, the definition of) life, they don't
expect to get anywhere, it is more of a game or something. And I suppose
occasionally some biologist thinks he's come up with the Ultimate Definition
of Life (using the Ten Tests of Timbuktu, or TTT :-) and goes on a one-man
crusade to convince the community that that's The Definition they've all
been looking for.
Have fun trying to send mail to me, it probably is possible but don't ask
me how.
Steve Clark EUnet: unido!ztivax!steve
Usenet: topaz!princeton!siemens!steve
CSnet: something like steve@siemens.siemens-rtl.com