Philosophy 101D

I found the video of the telepathic monkey!

I hope everyone remembered to read the Kline article “What is technology?” for tomorrow’s class. We will spend most of the time discussing that piece.

Also, please schedule an appointment with me if you’d like to talk about the midterm! I haven’t heard from anyone, so let me repeat: I will be grading the midterm with a very critical eye, so don’t expect an easy grade. I figure that I don’t grade the website material very harshly, and you have plenty of opportunities for extra credit, so I am allowed to be harsh on the tests. Whether you have a few clarification questions or you’d like me to go over a draft, please meet with me to discuss your work. My office hours are right after class, and I have a fairly open schedule if you want to make an appointment.

Also, one last anthropomorphism vid:

Here’s a good, though old, Discover Magazine article about self organizing, evolved machines that is worth a read.

Evolving a conscious machine

Strangely, Thompson has been unable to pin down how the chip was accomplishing the task. When he checked to see how many of the 100 cells evolution had recruited for the task, he found no more than 32 in use. The voltage on the other 68 could be held constant without affecting the chip’s performance. A chip designed by a human, says Thompson, would have required 10 to 100 times as many logic elements—or at least access to a clock—to perform the same task. This is why Thompson describes the chip’s configuration as flabbergastingly efficient.

It wasn’t just efficient, the chip’s performance was downright weird. The current through the chip was feeding back and forth through the gates, swirling around, says Thompson, and then moving on. Nothing at all like the ordered path that current might take in a human-designed chip. And of the 32 cells being used, some seemed to be out of the loop. Although they weren’t directly tied to the main circuit, they were affecting the performance of the chip. This is what Thompson calls the crazy thing about it.

Thompson gradually narrowed the possible explanations down to a handful of phenomena. The most likely is known as electromagnetic coupling, which means the cells on the chip are so close to each other that they could, in effect, broadcast radio signals between themselves without sending current down the interconnecting wires. Chip designers, aware of the potential for electromagnetic coupling between adjacent components on their chips, go out of their way to design their circuits so that it won’t affect the performance. In Thompson’s case, evolution seems to have discovered the phenomenon and put it to work.

It was also possible that the cells were communicating through the power-supply wiring. Each cell was hooked independently to the power supply; a rapidly changing voltage in one cell would subtly affect the power supply, which might feed back to another cell. And the cells may have been communicating through the silicon substrate on which the circuit is laid down. The circuit is a very thin layer on top of a thicker piece of silicon, Thompson explains, where the transistors are diffused into just the top surface part. It’s just possible that there’s an interaction through the substrate, if they’re doing something very strange. But the point is, they are doing something really strange, and evolution is using all of it, all these weird effects as part of its system.

In some of Thompson’s creations, evolution even took advantage of the personal computer that’s hooked up to the system to run the genetic algorithm. The circuit somehow picked up on what the computer was doing when it was running the programs. When Thompson changed the program slightly, during a public demonstration, the circuit failed to work.

All the creations were equally idiosyncratic. Change the temperature a few degrees and they wouldn’t work. Download a circuit onto one chip that had evolved on a different, albeit apparently identical chip, and it wouldn’t work. Evolution had created an extraordinarily efficient, utterly enigmatic circuit for solving a problem, but one that would survive only in the environment in which it was born. Thompson describes the problem, or the evolutionary phenomenon, as one of overexploiting the physics of the chips. Because no two environments would ever be exactly alike, no two solutions would be, either.

Cases like this seem to justify Turing’s argument that ‘machines can sometimes surprise me’, though Turing was quite far from thinking along these lines.

I thought this article was interesting, especially considering our latest topic in class. Apparently Japanese scientists have created a robot that can “taste” food.
Japanese unveil robot wine steward

This reminded me of “The Robot Reply” which is part of the Searle article. The argument is: if we put a computer inside a robot which apparently perceives the world around it (through seeing, doing, tasting, etc.) couldn’t we say that the robot really has the ability to understand? Searle says no, because the robot is still just manipulating symbols and facts.

All right, imagine this…. the total Turing test. Scientist build what they claim is an intelligent robot. It can decently carry on a conversation. It can see using cameras and scanning devices. It can taste with a more evolved version of the technology described in the article above. It can also detect sound, touch, and smell.

So… does this robot have a mind like we do?

My instinct tells me no.

The artificial intelligence tests we’ve discussed the most frequently are chess and using language. I don’t think either one of these is particularly good for comparing a computer to the human mind. Chess is a closed, formal system which the computer can play with probability and calculations. Even language can be sort of calculated, because of the structure that comes with grammar. The computer could pick out key words and arrange appropriate responses according to the Subject- Verb- Object foundation.

I think a better test would be analyzing a painting.

Take the robot I’ve described and tell it to say what it thinks the painting means. The robot sees the picture through the camera lens. It scans the painting from top to bottom, picking up on colors, lines and space. Assuming the picture isn’t abstract, the robot might be able to tell you if the subject is a woman, a building, etc.

The robot also might have certain information about paintings and symbolism programmed in, such as: blue is used in sad paintings, or a + shape might somehow allude to crucifixion; but, I don’t believe a robot could ever give an interpretation on what the painting might symbolize, or for that matter, decide whether or not the painting is beautiful. The thought process is too subjective. These decisions can’t be made with the manipulation of symbols.

I realize I’ve given somewhat of an “X- factor” response, but analyzing art is somewhat different from some of the other X-factors listed by Turing. Some of the examples he gives include: falling in love, caring, enjoying strawberries and cream, and having a sense of humor. I agree with Turing’s critics that the human mind is somewhat needed for these abilities, but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the kind of intelligence that artificial intelligence tries to replicate. Learning art, however, most definitely requires intelligence…. the kind of intelligence computers simply cannot have.

Thoughts on this?

As said in class, the biggest problem in philosophy to this day is the problem of the mind. How do the mind and the body interact? If the mind (the consciousness) and the body (the physical world) are distinct as Descartes says, then how can they interact and affect one another?

I find the five different theories we discussed in class about the relationship betweeen the body and the mind to be very intriguing (maybe mostly because they each have cute little stick figure images to associate with them).

The theory of eliminative materialism states that consciousness is just an illusion, and that examining the mind simply ends with looking in the physical world at how the brain works and the matter and motions that make it up. Thus, there is only the physical world, and anything regarding a separate and distinct consciousness is baloney. I find this hard to believe, but I suppose it is somewhat plausible.

The theory of epophenominalism is that the consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the physical world, meaning that what happens in the physical world gives rise to what we think in our conscious thoughts, but that our consciousness cannot influence our physical world. This is very interesting because it makes sense that what we experience in the real world influences our thought. As Descartes points out, even our imagination is simply the reconstruction of bits and pieces of things from our physical world. It would be very hard to disprove that what we experience in the physical world gives rise to our consciousness, because the only we I could think of doing that would be to deprive someone of all of their senses and see if they still had thoughts. But I am pretty sure there may be some ethical problems associated with that.

Descartes’s own theory is the theory of interaction, that both the physical world and the consciousness influence one another. I have to say I most agree with this theory, although maybe not in the sense that Descartes was trying to prove. As I said before, there is no doubt in my mind that experiences in the physical world give rise to conscious thought, but I also believe conscious thought can bring about change in the physical world as well. If we are confronted by a problem, we think critically about the problem and analyze our options. More often than not, we are able to come up with a solution. We apply that solution to the problem, and voila, the consciousness has provided us with an answer that was able to manifest itself in the real world.

The theory of parallelism is just plain weird. The mind and the body are distinct, they do not interact, but they match up perfectly. My consciousness is thinking about going to sleep right now, and it just so happens that that’s what my body wants to do too! I really just have a hard time believing that our whole existence and what we do is essentially a coincidence.

The idealist theory is that there is only a consciousness, and nothing physical actually exists. This is a little too Matrix-y, brain-in-the-vat for me, but then I guess if there was nothing physical even our brain wouldn’t exist and we would be..floating blobs of nothingness having conscious thoughts?

Anyway, I guess I can see where each of these theories has its flaws, but Descartes theory of interaction or the theory of epiphenominalism makes the most sense to me. But really, I think as much as anyone analyzes this, it will never be figured out.

I also have a question unrelated to my post:

If Descartes’s proof of God’s existence is that  God is all-perfect and existence is a kind of perfection, then therefore God must exist, then wouldn’t he be able to conclude that because he himself (Descartes) exists, and because existence is a kind of perfection, then therefore he (Descartes) is perfect?

From Time magazine:

The Mystery of Consciousness
by Steven Pinker

It shouldn’t be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body’s death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.” And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.