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PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 2:36 pm 
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If an entity has passed a Turing test, what it has done is it has convinced a human that it, too, is intelligent. In such a way, the Turing test is (maybe) a sufficient qualification for intelligence, but it is not a necessary qualification. No-one ever claimed it was.

To use the example above: Deep Blue beat Kasparov; I watched the entire match and screamed audibly (frightening everyone else in the university computer lab that summer) when Kasparov resigned in the last game. In the rematch several years later (which I did not watch) Kasparov tied Deep Blue, but according to the rules of chess, then, Deep Blue retains its supremacy. As was pointed out, though, if either Deep Blue or Kasparov found itself or himself in a burning building, only Kasparov would conceive of a desire to save himself. In that fashion, Deep Blue fails a Turing test; but there may be some other way for Deep Blue to argue itself intelligent.

I don't think it can, though. All Deep Blue can do is examine chess positions and evaluate their potential for bringing about a favourable outcome for either player. My home PC can do that in precisely the same way, though not nearly as fast, and it can do other things, too; so if anything, my PC (which skips frames playing Doom 3 at 640*480) is more intelligent than Deep Blue, which cost something in six or seven figures.

Someone mentioned "free will". I postulate this for you: human consciousnesses are hosted in human brains, and human brains are machines. (They may or may not be computers, but ....) The behaviour of a machine, given any particular environment and internal state, is absolutely predictable. Free will, thus, is an illusion, though a useful one, since the number of possible environments and internal states that might affect a human being is very large.

Now, by contrast, a toaster's behaviour is very simple. It can be described as a deterministic finite automaton:

(0) if sufficient electrical power, go to 1, else go to 0
(1) if lever depressed, go to 2, else go to 0
(2) if heating coil at limit temperature, go to 3, else go to 4
(3) heat the coil some more and go to 2
(4) turn off the heating coil, raise the lever and go to 0

Deterministic finite automata are the minimum machines which can execute regular expressions. Computers are the minimum machines which can execute interpreters for computer languages. Human brains, so far as we know, are the minimum machines which can execute consciousnesses. The question becomes -- why?


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 6:22 pm 
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Proin Drakenzol wrote:
me wrote:
sorry, but toasters fall under the "zero-int" category too. They don't think for themselves, everything is purely mechanical, and a toaster can't turn itself on at its own discretion.


If it had a(n) (electronic) brain and could do things of its own free will then it would be intellegent. A toaster has no control over itself, everything it does is in reaction to outside physical forces and (unless it is broken) it and all other toasters always perform the same action(s) when the same forces are applied.


As Tamayo mentioned earlier, "intelligence" is not well defined, but the way the word is usually used not equivilent to free will. Intelligence varies from low (limited) to high (free), and how can you have a limited amount of free will? We're most familiar with intelligence going hand-in-hand with free will, but there's really no reason the two have to be linked. Your self-activating toaster would have free will, but if all it could do was make a binary decision to turn itself on or off, it would not be intelligent.

With regard to the ability to learn and self-program, what about adaptive systems? They alter their internal state until they achieve some feedback condition. They've been around since the 1940s but I think we can agree that the analog phone system is not intelligent in a meaningful way.

Likewise, nearly every animal can recognize and react to danger. (Fire, predators, etc.) But we don't consider them the moral equivalents of a human. (Well, <i>I</i> don't anyway...)

On a more practical tangent, great apes <i>do</i> appear to have a near-human level of ... err ... human consciousness. Should we consider them to be fellow sophonts or some fraction thereof? Accepting a continuum definition of consciousness and relative worth can be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_compromise">manifestly unfair</a>, but a rigid binary definition can also lead to <a href="http://www.newshounds.us/2005/02/09/killer_instinct.php">inanity around the lower boundary</a>.

Myself, I'm going to stick with the "I know it when I see it" definition of a sophont for now.

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 7:03 pm 
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I guess what I meant is that in order to have any intellegence at all one has to have some sort of free will. Free will either is or it isn't, but its presense must be there for intellegence.

Plus if you want a form of "limited free will" the people from DearS are genetically engineered slaves, they need a master (need as in crave) and must serve that master absolutely, but within those bounds, which are hardcoded, they can exercise their own discretion.

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 9:04 pm 
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I think I missed something... what's DearS?

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 9:12 pm 
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A nice big argument against the adequacy of the Turing test.

Except, of course, that it's a giant load of crap. Searle comes as close as possible to saying "Only humans can have a soul, which makes them special and intelligent" without stating it outright. His responses to the arguments against the Chinese room make me giggle. There's no good reason that I've seen that a Turing machine cannot be intelligent.

I also fail to see any reason why free will is a prerequisite of intelligence. Let's say you had some robot that was controlled by a program that was for all intents and purposes equivalent to a human mind but compelled by its programming to obey whatever commands were given to it. These commands could be anything, from writing stories to imitating someone at a press conference to taking care of someone's children. The robot may be a slave, but it is no less intelligent than if it could make its own decisions.


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 10:13 pm 
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Proin Drakenzol wrote:
I guess what I meant is that in order to have any intellegence at all one has to have some sort of free will. Free will either is or it isn't, but its presense must be there for intellegence.

Plus if you want a form of "limited free will" the people from DearS are genetically engineered slaves, they need a master (need as in crave) and must serve that master absolutely, but within those bounds, which are hardcoded, they can exercise their own discretion.

Discretion is not exactly the same thing as free will. Free will says that your mind can transition from one state to another for no reason except that you wish it. No neurotransmitters, hormones, or quantum trickery. Your mind is totally non-causal and non-deterministic. Of course, if you believe in behavior-modifying drugs, you probably don't believe in free will too much.

The Baron wrote:
A nice big argument against the adequacy of the Turing test.

Wow. An entire paper based on appeal to false analogy. NIce.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 12:20 am 
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Searle makes me want to run, scream and barf. Grrr. Yay Baron!


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 1:39 am 
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Autophage wrote:
I think I missed something... what's DearS?


an anime. don't worry 'bout it.

...
and as for "free will," well let's just say what we understand to be "free will," or at least percieve as "free will."

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 7:36 am 
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I guess what I meant is that in order to have any intellegence at all one has to have some sort of free will. Free will either is or it isn't, but its presense must be there for intellegence.
As Barreh and Thinneh have pointed out, what is the justification for establishing "free will" as a pre-requisite for intelligence? There are humans who claim that humankind lacks free will, but that we are, none-the-less, intelligent. There are also humans (see Behavioral Science) who believe that human beings are merely biological machines with pre-determined reactions to specific environmental conditions (to whom one desires to ask, "What is the set of conditions which causes human beings to react by inventing the concept of behavioural science?" But that's beside the point.)
Proin Drakenzol wrote:
...and as for "free will," well let's just say what we understand to be "free will," or at least percieve as "free will."

Do we, then, have a consensus on what constitutes free will? If not, then we can't "just say what we understand to be 'free will'."

And now we're trying to define 3 different nebulous terms by our ability to test an entity for a characteristic those terms decribe.

<3 this thread.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 12:27 pm 
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Emy the brilliant wrote:
And now we're trying to define 3 different nebulous terms by our ability to test an entity for a characteristic those terms decribe.


We should be embarrassed. I know I am. Sherlocke Holmes said that "arguing in advance of data is ridiculous" (or something like that) and if you have to use a fictional character as an authority, use him, not some anime thingy. ;-)


Edit: it was "theorizing in advance of data is a capital crime", I believe.


Last edited by Tamayo on Tue Mar 29, 2005 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 2:21 pm 
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in·tel·li·gence Audio pronunciation of "intelligence" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-tl-jns)
n.

1.
1. The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge.
2. The faculty of thought and reason.
3. Superior powers of mind. See Synonyms at mind.


is this definition of intelligence agreable?

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 3:04 pm 
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Again, same thing.

How good at something do you have to be to have that capacity?
How good at something do you have to be to have a faculty?

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 4:57 pm 
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If you can read stories and answer questions about them, are you intelligent? If that's all you can do, no, it's still weak AI. those definitions are meaningless to this discussion because they don't have any definite requirements.


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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 9:12 pm 
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Again, same thing.

How good at something do you have to be to have that capacity?
How good at something do you have to be to have a faculty?


I didn't say it was a great definition. I just asked if we could use it as a starting point. After all, it's hard to solve a diferential equation if one can't agree on what constitutes a number.

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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:57 am 
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Step 1: Build time machine.
Step 2: Go back in time to 1978.
Step 3: Kill John Searle.

/me just spent way too long demolishing that pile of bullshit in a paper. You'd think that responding to insanity like that would be easy, but it's like trying to scientifically prove creationism wrong--what are you going to do? They're just going to say "GOD DID IT! NYAAA!"


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 9:59 am 
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Upon thought, I would think that a good definition of sapiance would be the ability to commumicate an interest beyond initial programing. For most living being that would be eat, sleep, fuck, saftey. Humans show interest in more then there instincts (as proven by this thread). I would even be willing to call some animals sapiant. Therefor I would be willing to say they had a soul, thus deserving of the moral considerations we give each other.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:32 am 
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One key point of a Turing test is that given a sufficiently complex program it is possible to be indistinguishable from an intelligent entity. The converse is that there is no real way of determining that actual intelligence is nothing more than a very complex set of instructions.

I'd venture that "eat, sleep, fuck, saftey" isn't a correct list. Many known forms of life don't sleep, for instance. "Fuck", is better off stated as "replicate". The most important item, "Learn", is missing. The ability to learn is a basic commonality of all life. A dog learns that rolled up newspapers are evil. Bacteria has the capacity to learn, if not consciously then by virtue of random mutation and evolution.

The list of biological needs are more specifically *inputs* to the biological program. They are not the program itself, simply a set of failure/success parameters.

In theory, the biological program is simply pattern matching. In the first day of life we establish the pattern that audible communication is required for food. In the years of our life we establish billions of patterns by communication, observation, and experience. Somewhere in the middle we make pointless philosophical posts on the internet. In any case, we're still running the same program with the same success/failure criteria - the only difference is in the number of accumulated patterns.

The only real difference between the bacteria and human intelligence is the learning curve. We can communicate to each other new information and adapt to that knowledge very quickly. Bacteria adapts to new stimulus over the course of several generations.

At what point does the rate of learning justify moral consideration? Or does it? What is this silly "moral code" anyway? Perhaps moral consideration is simply another pattern. It's an association that if we infringe on the "biological inputs" of certain groups/individuals that retaliation will ensue.

Maybe that's the real key! We only really give moral consideration to those who have the capacity to retaliate against us. If the alien intelligence has weapons of mass destruction, they can have all the moral consideration they want, otherwise... lets see if they're edible.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 6:07 am 
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Ok, I will admit that that was a simplified list of besic insticts, but it was to get the point across. The ability to learn is essential for sapience though.

I think my example would be better served by going through the AI example. The problem with AI's is that we have no clue when we can say we have succeeded or if we have just created another SI (Simulated Intelligence) The only true test of when something is truely self aware and sapient is when the computer asks "Who am I? without being told to say it. To have it say "I exist" without us telling it so.

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