salut,
"F. Frank LeFever" wrote:
> Let me pluck this one thing from the romantic rhapsody: I think I see
> something like the scandalously dishonest use of an implicit (never
> explicitly defined) concept of "consciousness" (maybe not even a
> concept, maybe just a sentimental bias) pervading that new growth
> industry, symposia on "brain and consciousness" (Searles, et al.)
[...]
> He seems to be saying, "you can't analyse or duplicate intelligence,
> because you just can't. I don't care how intelligent it seems to be,
> if it's not natural intelligence, it really isn't!" And then he goes
> on about how wonderful it all is.
*lol*
I somehow agree with you on that point. But certainly it's not that
easy.
Searle has some famous arguments on his side, e.g. the chinese room
argument [1]:
Briefly, imagine someone who understands no Chinese being confined in
a room with a set of rules for systematically transforming strings of
symbols to yield other strings of symbols. As it turns out, the input
strings are Chinese questions, and the output strings Chinese answers.
Nevertheless it would be odd to say that the person in the room
understood any of the questions or answers.
Therefore, rule-governed syntactic manipulation of symbols is not
sufficient for understanding.
Anyway, I think the most plausible definitions of intelligence are
functional definitions, and there is no a priori reason to doubt that
some machine could perform the necessary functions. After all, the
Chinese room (including the person in it) is an intelligent system,
whatever else is missing.
As for consciousness, it seems that one just begs the question if one
seeks a functional definition. The difference between a conscious
system and a system that lacks consciousness is in the first place not
that the former can perform actions which the latter can not, but that
"there is anything it is like to be" the former system, but not the
latter [2].
This is of course far from a definition.
cu,
Wolfgang.
[1] John Searle: "Mind, Brains, and Programs", Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 3 (1980):417-457
[2] Thomas Nagel: "What is it like to be a bat?", Philosophical
Review 83 (1974):435-450
Ned Block: "On a confusion about a function of consciousness",
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995):272-287
David Chalmers: "Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness",
Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995):200-219
--
homepage: http://www.wald.org/wolfgang
"Wo kaemen wir hin, wenn jeder sagte: 'wo kaemen wir hin?' und keiner
ginge, um zu sehen, wohin wir kaemen, wenn wir gingen?"
