Jon,
In my attempt not to bend this thread I have now created thread chaos. Damn! My problem with the Turing Test Game is that it’s never played honestly. Give me a computer that can glare continuously at it’s opponent for 20 minutes at a time and I will give you a chess-playing computer. Give me a computer than can cough just as its opponent is choosing a card, and I will give you a poker-playing computer. Give me a computer than can frisk about, enticing other computers to join it in the frisking, and I will give you a joyous computer. Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 12:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [FRIAM] GPT-3 and the chinese room >From my perspective, it is helpful to consider a larger history of the consciousness debate. In what could be considered the beginning of the end of African slavery in the west, natural philosophers would seek to find in the physiology of black men structures to explain their inferiority and in some extreme cases their inhumanity. Neal Stephenson, in his Baroque Cycle (~)trilogy, caricatures how embarrassing white people be when in the pursuit of the consciousness question. In the novel, a Nigerian born linguist named Dappa attempts, through the power of words and ideas, to argue for the freedom of enslaved people in the west (circa the 1660s). Meanwhile, many spectators look on and muse about how nearly human Dappa's arguments sound, but ultimately must not be confused with the utterances of a reasoning being. Stephenson highlights the cruelty and tyranny that enterprises like these can create. The Turing test generally reeks of this sort of pursuit. Rather than beginning with the assumption that the other experiences and then wondering what that experience is like, we set up an endless procession of tests which on the one hand we hope will converge in the limit to understanding, and which on the other will entertain us in the meantime. The Turing test has appeared to me to be a horrible diversion from the discovery of more promising methodologies. One day, perhaps there will be a construction that passes all acceptable Turing tests, and this day will be a sad day because we will likely still have no answers to our initial investigations regarding what it is to be conscious and what it is to experience as another does. Perhaps, the question will be considered solved for all time and the potential needed to reopen the topic exceedingly expensive. Somewhere, Minsky expressed remorse for how some of his results in the field of AI had managed to close the general AI question for decades, ultimately shifting the pursuit away from the hard question and instead towards the pursuit of novel gadgets. In the spirit of EricC's comments about the distinction of surface tension and PH, if consciousness is a thing, then it should be so whether or not we all agree.
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