Speculations on AI and the Turing Test

In brief, I take no stand on whether what we call AI is possible in fact—i.e. whether a machine could ever be created that would have consciousness. The belief that it can (rather than the more reasonable hypothesis that it can) is circular and religious, based on acceptance of the (currently) unprovable hypothesis that human consciousness is already a type of machine consciousness.

The Turing Test is inadequate to prove machine consciousness. Any test based upon the imitation of signs can fail. As the woman or man can make you believe she is in love with you just to get your money, so a computer “consciousness” may well be able to process the signs of human consciousness so well that no human can distinguish this performance from actual consciousness, and yet the computer may yet not be conscious.

The computer would know if it was conscious, since knowing one is conscious and being conscious are the same thing. But its assurance to us that it is conscious wouldn’t be the same as being conscious. (And in any case computer consciousness would probably be a new kind of consciousness, and as such would fall under the problem of definition rather than fact.)

So what? In practical terms, it doesn’t make any difference whether a computer is conscious or whether it only seems to us to be conscious. If it looks like consciousness and acts like consciousness there’s no more harm in pretending that it is conscious than there is in pretending that you cat loves you (incidentally, your cat doesn’t give a shit about you).

True, if we ever get there, there will be all sorts of moral questions that will have to be answered. And it will cause us to rethink what it means for us to be conscious in ways that we now are not constrained to think. But we are so far from there that I feel no interest in addressing these speculative questions as though they were practical. They will compel humans to adjust their own notion of morality. Making those adjustments now, however, would be foolish, since the thing that would inspire that readjustment is a mere hypothesis. It is right now the job of fiction to lay the groundwork, not science, not theology, not psychology.

The believers in the Turing Test are making a religious argument. This is their proof that God does not exist, that humans are not special, that life itself is not special, that the brain is an organic computer. (We’ve seen this before.) But since the Turing Test won’t prove consciousness, and the proof of consciousness is not a scientific proof, i.e. not a matter for science, conclusions based on the test won’t be trustworthy and won’t affect science. Conclusions based on a hypothetical passage of the test one day in the future are meaningless today. (That doesn’t mean speculation is meaningless or that this isn’t the time for that speculation, which it absolutely is—in fiction, in I, Robot, and She, and Galatia 2.2., just as 1820 was the right time to speculate about the role of electromagnetism in bringing inert tissue to life, which gave us Frankenstein. That was great as fiction; it did not end up working as science.)  

AI may be achievable, and may be achieved some day, perhaps even soon. But "I can't tell if it's a computer behind the curtain or a person" won't confirm that the day has arrived.

Is Two Plus Two Really Four?

We have each other’s blood on our hands.

And in our veins.

Husserl apparently marveled that “2+2=4” is true, everywhere and always, whether beings exist who are capable of comprehending it or not. It’s an ineluctably true statement.

If so, then “2+2=4 is true everywhere and always, whether beings exist who are capable of understanding it or not” is also an ineluctably true statement. And that one isn’t about math. This leads me to suspect a problem.

Has Husserl made a distinction between the statement as statement and the “fact” to which the statement is a pointer? I don’t know. The statement is not true in itself. The statement becomes true in reference to a system of language that defines the meaning of its terms. In mathematics, in the base ten system (and obviously others, but not all), the statement 2+2=4 is true—by definition. There is no requirement for the concepts marked by “2,” “4,” “+,” or “=” to have any extension in material reality. And in other contexts the statement may either be false or nonsense, even where those five concepts have meaning.

So what Husserl is (presumably) noticing is that the concepts in question are such at that other beings elsewhere in the universe would, in theory, with time identify them, would come up with a mathematics which recognized number precisely as we do and also combination and equality. And it is because of the nature or facts of the universe that this would (or always in theory could) happen. Our math has done such a good job helping us understand and control our world that it must correspond in an essential way to what the world is so that any intelligent beings given time would also discover the same math. (Or if not, and we found them, we could teach them our math and they would understand it and acknowledge its truth.)

Maybe.

But it seems to me the claim is highly homocentric. It implies that the rightness of our math exists independent of the perspective of the people who invented/discovered and deploy it on the world. Question: If you did not (and for some imaginable reason could not) see the world in terms of numbers, would our math from your perspective be true? Might you be able to describe and control the world using some system of knowledge that is not mathematical? We don’t know what that would be. It might be something like direct apprehension and what we would have to call intuition, as a bird creates a nest without math, but a bird that could explain what he’s doing.

There is reason to believe that the concept of number is not natural. Humans everywhere seem to develop some sort of number system for their own use, with obvious similarities (and real differences). But they are all humans. We humans tend to invent the borders between things and then to believe that those borders are real borders. We count the number of mushrooms in the circle without realizing that they are no more distinct mushrooms than the individual feet of a centipede are distinct creatures.

There are times when it is useful to count them and to limit them, but there is always something false in that act.

That statement “2+2=4” and the statement “2+2=4 is true everywhere and always, whether beings exist who are capable of understanding it or not” may be useful anywhere in the universe under certain conditions. But neither one is simply ineluctably true.