Artificial Intelligence

If we’re talking about constantly refining a model of human behaviour and thinking I can’t see why that isn’t possible in some sense although I’m not sure there’s even a universally totally consistent human model of it, let alone an AI one.

Even if the model got to be indistinguishable from a human being would that make is sentient? I can’t see how it could be human. I suppose it could be “something else”.

[Laird]

These indeed are interesting questions. This perhaps relates closely to whether human technology can finally create an artificial general intelligence modeled on human behavior that comes so close that it could be classed as an actual "philosophical zombie" (p-zombie). This amounts to whether there ever will be the settling of the old debate over p-zombies.


Adapted from Wiki:

This is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a being that, if it could conceivably logically exist, logically disproves the idea that physical substance is all that is required to explain consciousness. Such a zombie would be indistinguishable from a normal human being but lack conscious experience, qualia, or sentience.

Philosophical zombie arguments are used in support of mind-body dualism against forms of physicalism such as materialism, behaviorism and functionalism. It is an argument against the idea that the "hard problem of consciousness" (accounting for subjective, intrinsic, first person, what-it's-like-ness) could be answered by purely physical means, in particular by means of artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems.

Proponents of the p-zombie argument, such as philosopher David Chalmers, argue that since a philosophical zombie is defined as being totally (in its behavior and appearance) physically indistinguishable from human beings (especially in verbal conversation), even its logical possibility would be a sound refutation of physicalism, because it would establish the existence of conscious experience as a further fact.


I don't think definitive answers to the beginning questions 1 & 2 will ever be forthcoming. Just ever more accurate and convincing (yet still ultimately imperfect) simulacra of human behavior and appearance. But I think that eventually such AGI systems may get good enough to fool everybody, no matter how closely examined. Accordingly, I think that it is clearly, logically possible that such an AGI system could eventually meet the requirements (above) of a true philosophical zombie, therefore refuting physicalism in the mind-body debate.

Of course, philosophical debates are by their very nature endless. Some physicalists like Daniel Dennett counter that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible; other physicalists like Christopher Hill argue that philosophical zombies are coherent but not metaphysically possible.

Interesting stuff, nbtruthman. Thanks for sharing.

I do find the p-zombie argument confusing though - and I think that this is because I am simply unable to conceive of physicalism as coherent in the first place, and so I find it difficult to assess an argument against it which starts with its (incoherent, in my view) presuppositions (in order to refute them). It is known that from a contradiction, anything follows, and perhaps this observation relates at least a little to my confusion over this argument, which, in my view, in some sense "assumes a contradiction" (or at least incoherence) at the start in order to refute it. Better, I think, is to simply point out that incoherence directly: subjective experience is categorically non-physical by definition, and thus any claim that experience is physical is, categorically and by definition, incoherent.

There ends the philosophical debate.

Some thoughts from my own more dualistic perspective on the possibility of a Turing machine closely approximating a p-zombie: I think that this, too, is incoherent (not surprisingly, since my more dualistic perspective does not share the physicalist premises of the p-zombie argument). When I say "I am conscious", I say it because I am conscious: thus, the fact of my being conscious is causally-efficacious with respect to my statement. This cause cannot, though, apply to a p-zombie, who, by definition, is not conscious, and thus the p-zombie (imitating/replicating me) would not (cannot) say it (under the same conditions that I would).

[Laird]

Dunno if anyone ever joined Kialo.com ? It was pushed as a new way to debate topics. For a while it seemed to have a big advertising budget as it was popping up on adverts for ages... $$$ millions.

I joined, just to see what it was about... and I immediately saw that somebody was using crowd sourcing to build topical arguments in a rigid for/against debate structure format, that could be accessed by a machine. I left after a week.

I honestly doubt that there is much more to the the IBM debate system demonstrated, beyond the clever application of programming for using such a rigid pre-populated database of for/against arguments, just like what is being crowd sourced by contributors at Kialo...

If you read through the comments, you will find some tidbits...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-kialo...egory-kohs

Fascinating, Max: I had a similar idea a while ago but haven't gotten around to implementing it yet (in part because it is so dauntingly huge a project that I have not been able to motivate myself to get beyond a few false starts). My idea was a little broader: provide a direct-democracy platform on which two basic types of proposals can be put forward. Firstly "epistemic" (knowledge-based) proposals, of the form "That such-and-such is true" (this is essentially as far as kialo.com seems to have gone), and, secondly, in part justified by specific epistemic proposals, "action" proposals, of the form "That we do/implement such-and-such" (and then there would also be "proposals" which take the form of (binding) legislative acts). Each proposal type would be publicly debated using almost exactly the paradigm that kialo.com seems to have adopted: competing sets of "pros" and "cons" - or arguments "for" and "against" - at a high level would be introduced, which could be broken down into lower-level pros and cons or arguments for and against. The whole system of proposals and arguments would have had both a hierarchical as well as a network structure. Ultimately, citizens would vote on proposals based on their assessment of the relative strengths of the arguments each way.

It is interesting, then, to see the objection that Gregory Kohs raises: that the fact that the "pros and cons" or "arguments for and against" can be collectively edited after having first been posted tends to corrupt the process (my paraphrasing/adaptation of his objection). I had, like kialo.com seems to have, understood that edits are necessary so as to ensure that the strongest possible phrasing/framing of each argument was presented, not just the first phrasing/framing that some random person happened to present. So, I will have to put some thought into how to incorporate Gregory's objection into my vision, and to adequately address it.