Btraven wrote:
> On Monday, January 9, 2023 at 4:14:11 AM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
>> Btraven wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, January 3, 2023 at 2:36:09 AM UTC-8, Ed Cryer wrote:
>>>> Btraven wrote:
>>>>> See a demo of a simulated conversation between machine and man, Latine utique. The illusion is the same one witnessed by Weizenbaum's secretary in 1966. Fifty years later programs can access much larger dictionaries and text corpora and have more sophisticated syntax analysis. Intelligence is, of course, out of the question. It's mostly lookup and stochastic process modeling. In real life the most meaningful texts are the least likely; in AI land the most "meaningful" texts are the most likely to be stored and regurgitated.
>>>>>
>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
>>>>>
>>>>> but now also:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://youtu.be/lAqKiaZukps
>>>>>
>>>>> Btraven
>>>>>
>>>>> p.s. The program "considers" its interlocutor to be a thing. 'Humanum' is used as a neuter vocative as in Byron's "roll on thou dark and deep blue ocean."
>>>
>>>> The old "Turing Test" was more impressive than this. It was famous all
>>>> over UK philosophy and psychology university departments when I was
>>>> studying in the 1990s.
>>>>
>>>
>>> In principle the Turing test is the same: its criterion of success is based on convincing the human mind. Turing imagines a suitably sophisticated witness of seemingly goal directed output (imagine an observer of a robot walking on a tight rope and imagining that the robot is feeling fear of falling or maybe even wishing to be admired for its poise and grace). If the performance can be made arbitrarily perfectable we can eventually forgive the observer for being duped. Even then there is no justification for believing that the robot's insideness rises to the level of ego consciousness even if the simulated state incorporates recursive functions that examine themselves. All computable functions need a halting condition.
>>> A real consciousness doesn't need this because it is founded on truly infinite regress. Of course in a real consciousness almost all of the recursion is unconscious, that unplumbable abyss. Perception is not identical to reality but is only a partial, abstracting sampling of a few salient features, always local. The wholeness of reality is always only imaginable, not perceivable. The hierarchy that you posit is always full of gaps, category errors, wishful thinking, every kind of trap, maze, and cul-de-sac of self deception. A nine year old fan of science fiction might be hoodwinked into believing that an algorithm might somehow realize that it is only an algorithm hoping to be able to wish to improve itself, but no serious mature psychologist ever will believe such a scenario. It does not compute. AI won't be able to fake it til it makes it but it could cause a lot of trouble before we pull the plug on it.
>>> The trouble is mainly the outcome of habitual mendacity. It vitiates perception and hollows out imagination.
>>>
>>> bt
>>>
>> "Mind" baffles science and philosophy. I once read a book from the 1920s
>> entitled "Theories of Mind". There were twenty-odd in it. *
>> However, I think it's beyond doubt that it is causally connected with
>> the brain; more a function of the brain rather than guiding it, and
>> associated with animals with larger brains and more social interaction.
>> Observe the hierarchy of animals; worms through to homo sapiens; do
>> slugs have mind?, squirrels?, cats? They have intelligent functions
>> within their survival niche and (in my opinion) varying degrees of mind;
>> some with none, but they function.
>>
>> Don't be misled by human prejudice of "soul"; nor by the fact that we
>> essentially are our mind (cogitamus ergo sumus) with its higher
>> cognitive abilities, feelings and self-awareness. I love and respect
>> them as much as most, but I refuse to be led into supernaturalism,
>> ghosts, gods and mysteries. I'm a product of the great age of science, a
>> western scientific rationalist.
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> * That book is seared onto my memory for having a final chapter "Is Life
>> Worthwhile?" I never figured out its reason for being there, but there's
>> something so unutterably amusing about its presence that it sends a wave
>> of happiness throughout my whole being just to recall it.
>
> I think I have at least identified the source of that final chapter. Here are the first paragraphs out of about 30 pages:
> "
> IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? ¹
> By WILLIAM JAMES.
>
> When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some
> fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the liver" had great currency in the newspapers. The answer that I propose to give cannot be jocose. In the
> words of one of Shakespeare's prologues,
>
> "I come no more to make you laugh; things now,
> That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
> Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"
>
> must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly, and I know not what such an Association as yours intends nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find.
>
> ¹ An address given before the Young Men's Christian Association of Harvard University and the Philadelphia Society for Ethical Culture. In order to meet a constant demand, it is reprinted. by permission, from the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895.
> "
> Apparently there was also a book with that title published sometime in the late 19th century. The only anthologies with titles incorporating "theories of mind" that I was able to track down were "Six theories of mind" by Charles Morris (1932) and "Theories of the mind" by Stephen Priest (1991). From what was exposed of the latter by Google Books my interest was piqued enough that I bought a used copy from Abebooks.
> Here's the toc:
>
> 1 DUALISM 1
> Plato 8
> The Cyclical Argument 8 The Recollection Argument 9
> The Soul and the Forms 10 The Affinity Argument 11
> The Argument from Opposites 15
> Descartes 15
> Existence and Essence 17 Two Substances 21
> Identity and Difference 23 Clear and Distinct Ideas 28
> Interaction 31 Union 33
> 2 LOGICAL BEHAVIOURISM 35
> Hempel 37
> The Vienna Circle 37 The Translation Project 39
> A Pseudo-Problem 41
> Ryle 43
> The Ghost in the Machine 44 Category Mistakes 45
> Dispositions 47 Occurrences 50 Introspection 50
> One World 52
>
> Wittgenstein 56
> The Private Language Argument and the Philosophy of
> Mind 57 Is Experience Private? 59
> Is Meaning Private? 61
>
> 3 IDEALISM 65
> Berkeley 71
> Matter in Question 71 Qualities 75
> Esse Est Percipi (To be is to be Perceived) 77 Minds 78
> Hegel 80
> The Critique of Dualism 81 Dialectic 83
> Universal and Particular 85 Self-Consciousness 91
> Master and Slave 92 Absolute Idealism 95
> 4 MATERIALISM 98
> Place 102
> A Scientific Hypothesis 102 Contingent Identities 105
> A Scientific Hypothesis 102 Contingent Identities 105
> Verifying Materialism 111 The Phenomenological Problem 112
> Type-Type or Token-Token? 113
> Davidson 115
> Three Principles 115 Anomalous Monism 116
> The Holism of the Mental 119
> Materialism and Freedom 121
> Honderich 122
> Psychoneural Nomic Correlation 124
> The Causation of Psychoneural Pairs 126
> The Causation of Actions 128
> Neuroscience and Quantum Mechanics 129
> Life Hopes 131
> 5 FUNCTIONALISM 133
> Putnam 137
> Brain States and Pain States 137 Turing Machines 139
> Functional States 141
> Lewis 145
> The Madman and the Martian 146 Causal Roles 147
> Materialist Functionalism 148
> 6 DOUBLE ASPECT THEORY 150
> Spinoza 154
> One Substance 154 Individuals 156
> God or Nature 156 Finitude 159
> Russell 161
> Neutral Monism 161 Matter 162 Mind 166 Sense Data 169
> Strawson 170
> Material Particulars 171 Three Theories of the Self 173
> Persons 175 Two Kinds of Predicate 179
> How is Dualism Thinkable? 181
> 7 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL VIEW 182
> Brentano 186
> Mental and Physical Phenomena 187
> Presentations 188 Outside Space 191
> Intentionality 193 Inner Consciousness 197
> Knowledge, Privacy and Time 199
> CONTENTS
> 8 CONCLUSION: HOW TO SOLVE THE MIND-BODY
> PROBLEM 210
> rhat are Minds? 210 What are Mental and Physical? 212
> What is Thinking? 213 What is Consciousness? 216
> What is Subjectivity? 218 What is Individuality? 220
> What is the Self? 221 What is Matter? 222
>
> ******
> Here's the latest from the AI front. Finally AI is being turned against itself:
>
> https://text.npr.org/1149206188
>
> bt
Had this book been written by William James, I'm sure I would have
remembered that fact. I recall conceiving the highest degree of respect
for WJ during my philosophy studies, with his Pragmatism and his
Varieties of Religious Experience. I read that the James boys conducted
sibling rivalry at the highest cultural level, and that William wrote
books of philosophy like a novelist, while his brother Henry wrote
novels like a philosopher. I subsequently read some HJ novels, and I
agree with the judgement.
This book was handed to me among several others by my tutor at Leeds
University in the early 1990s. I was starting an MA course entitled
"Philosophical Issues in Psychology" and it formed introductory reading.
I handed them back when read.
When I get to heaven and am granted personal colloquy with the Creator,
I'll ask him two things; What the dickens is mind, and how to reconcile
classical physics with quantum mechanics. The latter defeated Albert
Einstein.
Ed