Anthropomorphism and Artificial Intelligence

I started to read a novel entitled "Marker" by Robin Cook. In the first chapter, he describes the sperm traveling to the fertilization of an ovum using the following adjectives or phrases:

like a group of anxious marathoners, relegating the others to short and frustrating futile lives, were lost in a form of self-sacrifice, the next ordeal for these living entities, unlucky casualties, the sperm's Holy Grail, goaded by irresistible chemical attraction, hapless haploid egg, frantically. This set me to thinking about The Chinese Room, consciousness and our tendency to anthropomorphize everything in sight.

Writers of novels want to write in a colorful way in order to entice the interest of the reader. That's fine, but it also reminds me that we have a natural(?) tendency to imagine things have a self awareness and consciousness that they clearly don't have. Obviously, sperm cells don't get "frustrated" or "frantic" when faced with an "ordeal" or "self-sacrifice." One might simply chalk it up to poetic license and have done with it, except that we all have some of this tendency and it contributes to our fallibility. For example, we attribute emotions like "happiness" to a bird twittering in a tree on a beautiful spring day. We attribute a playful mood to squirrels chasing one another. Actually, we have no notion about whether or not animals feel these emotions under such circumstances. All we know is what we would feel if we acted in an analogous way. I think this is part of the mental machinery we use to predict the behavior of other humans. The philosopher Daniel Dennett writes about this ability to predict the behavior of others as a survival characteristic that has influenced the genetic wiring of the brain.

When Turing said that if a machine in a black-box responds in a fashion that would lead us to believe there's a human in the box, then the machine in the box is intelligent, he was really saying something about our limitations. We observe behavior of either black boxes or humans and are still incapable of determining whether they feel what we feel, perceive what we perceive, or know what we know in the same way we do in our own minds. It is only because we see humans as biologically the same as ourselves that makes us fairly certain that they are intelligent in the same way that we are. It is in our nature to make that assumption in order to make others actions appear predictable and rational. We have little control over that tendency. The proof is our need to anthropomorphize in the way that Robin Cook does. The more physically similar a creature is to a human, the more we credit it with "intelligence" until it's action proves otherwise. Perhaps this is why men see women as irrational rather than simply different. Perhaps this is why L-minds and C-minds see each other as irrational. It's no surprise to me that people like Searle will not be satisfied that a machine can be intelligent. Since intelligence can only be surmised from observtion of action, it's a totally optional label. It's in the eye of the beholder.

from Joel: Sarkozy, democracy

In his "bon voyage" message our friend and leader Ira said:

I don't think we'll be meeting their new C-minded President Sarkozy, but I'm pleased he was elected in time for our trip :^)

Play nice!

Joel responds:

While our leader is away in France, I think it might be appropriate to tell you folks about my prognostications for the presidency of the conservative Sarkozy. Philosophically speaking, I find it interesting, because it's an illustration of what Plato said about the downside of democracy.

Sarkozy was elected as a conservative reform candidate with a large majority of the vote, because many socialists crossed over party lines. There is a general recognition in France that socialism has failed in the areas of health care, immigration, employment, education and welfare. If President Sarkozy actually tries to make reforms, he will probably meet the same resistance that Chirac met when he took over from the socialist president Mitterand. The various sectors of populus will simply not give up their advantages. The students will not give up their subsidized living. The civil servants will not give up their long vacations and early retirements. The unionists will not give up their strangle-hold on public utilities and private industry. The unemployed will not give up their subsidized life style. It seems to be the nature of man that an special advantage, once won, will not be sacrificed unless all are feeling the same pain.

France is a peculiar version of democracy. There is a significant measure of anarchy mixed in. The university students will take to the streets as they have many times in the past. (The beautiful cobblestone work of the streets of the Latin Quarter is gone, because the students used the stones as weapons against the police in 1968.) The school children will parade against reform led by their civil servant teachers. The workers at the gas and electric companies, as in the past, will shut off the power to the Metro. Sporadic strikes of the air controllers will be used to cripple the airports as they have in the past. It's hard to know whether or not Sarkozy will attempt to use force to quell this kind of rebellion. That hasn't worked under past administrations. It just generated a hatred for the police.

Plato's point that democracy in the long run leads inevitably to tyranny, will have been demonstrated once again. Hopefully the French will not turn to the National Socialists (the French version of the Nazi party) in frustration.

With respect, Joel

Ira Traveling for a Couple Weeks

Joel and Stu have been deputized as Administrators for this Blog and they have full powers and authority to do whatever needs to be done, and even more if they want to.

Along with 19 other members of our local bicycle club, I'm headed to Paris for a few days and then to the Loire Valley of France, southeast of Paris, for some bicycling and barging. We'll be sleeping and eating on the barge "Fleur" where we'll be the only passengers. After breakfast, we'll bicycle and meet the barge at the next port.

I don't think we'll be meeting their new C-minded President Sarkozy, but I'm pleased he was elected in time for our trip :^)

Play nice!

Ira Glickstein

LINKS TO TEN MOST RECENT COMMENTS !!!

It took lots of research, but I finally got something working to make recent Comments easier to keep up with.

Look in the right-hand column, after the "Blog Archives" box that lists the main Topics for the current month and you will see the "Ten Most Recent Comments" box that provides the first part of the text, and the date, of the most recently published Comments!

If you click on the blue hypertext, the page for the Topic will appear and you can scroll down to read the remaining text of the Comment and see it in the context of previous and subsequent Comments.

I would have liked it better if the info in the box included the name of the Commenter and the name of the Topic, but that was not available to me at the website where I got the Javascript.

IN THE FUTURE, IF YOU PUT YOUR NAME FIRST IN YOUR COMMENT TEXT ALONG WITH THE TOPIC TITLE, THAT IS WHAT WILL APPEAR IN THE "COMMENTS" BOX.

Sample Comment text:

From: Ira, Re: Links to Ten ... This is a sample Comment to test the new feature I recently added to the Blog.
...

(I posted the first Comment to this Topic thread to show you how to do that. My Comment did not appear right away in the box as I expected it to. There is a delay, but the Comment apeared less than a half-hour later. It appears RSS feeds update at about that rate.)

If anyone has a better way to do this, please send an email to me at ira@techie.com and I will be happy to improve this new linking feature.

Ira Glickstein

More on L and Cminds

First read the short article at the link below which analyzes the paradox of why we continue to buy gas guzzling cars and at the same time most people, including truck and SUV owners, support higher taxes on gas to promote conservation.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/07/23/070723ta_talk_surowiecki?printable=true

Given all of that, I was particularly struck by the following paragraph:

Back in the nineteen-seventies, an economist named Thomas Schelling, who later won the Nobel Prize, noticed something peculiar about the N.H.L. At the time, players were allowed, but not required, to wear helmets, and most players chose to go helmet-less, despite the risk of severe head trauma. But when they were asked in secret ballots most players also said that the league should require them to wear helmets. The reason for this conflict, Schelling explained, was that not wearing a helmet conferred a slight advantage on the ice; crucially, it gave the player better peripheral vision, and it also made him look fearless.

The players wanted to have their heads protected, but as individuals they couldn’t afford to jeopardize their effectiveness on the ice. Making helmets compulsory eliminated the dilemma: the players could protect their heads without suffering a competitive disadvantage. Without the rule, the players’ individually rational decisions added up to a collectively irrational result. With the rule, the outcome was closer to what players really wanted.

Here seems to be an instance where even a staunch conservative would have to allow that sometimes we need a higher power like the government to act as a stern parent and look out for our best interests. In other words, individual freedom and choice are not an absolute, not the best in every situation.

What say you, C-minds?

Stu

[EDITed by Ira to make link clickable and structure the long quote]

Emulation versus Simulation (Muddled follow-on)

Thanks to Stu for starting an interesting topic about artificial life (Loose Words-Muddled Thinking). I'm starting a fresh thread, because comments are difficult to find and keep track of on this blog. Also, in this blog, "comments" don't appear in the daily email.

Stu said:

However, the phrase that pushed my hot button was " a researcher proposes to recreate a living organism inside a computer." And while the following sentence mitigates that image somewhat, the actual article in the Economist further perpetuates the myth that it is possible to create life within the computer itself:

"David Harel of the Weizmann Institute in Israel ... proposes to recreate living organisms inside a computer."

And so it seems to me that even intellectually respectable organizations such as the Economist and Sigma Xi can fall prey to muddy thinking. A computer simulation of a process is not the process itself just as the pictures in Playboy are not really flesh and blood human beings. As John Searle has pointed out in his essay, "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?" (short answer: NO!!!

Joel responds:

I'll take the opposite position and say that the brain's mind IS a computer program. To understand what I mean, we first need to refine the difference between a simulation and an emulation. A SIMULATION is an mathematical approximation of a real physical system which receives inputs and sends outputa. The accuracy of the outputs is based upon how good a model we are using. An EMULATION is a perfect substitute for a real physical system. In computer science, an emulation might be computer software which substitutes for a proposed piece of computer hardware so that it can be tested before it's actually manufactured. An example of a simulation might be a model of Earth's energy balance which can predict global warming and cooling trends. The simulation is clearly not the planet itself any more than a FAX of a pizza is a pizza. However, an emulation of a pizza would be the same as a pizza in all important regards. Clearly, edibility is an important aspect.

Suppose I produce an imitation of a pizza which looks like a pizza, smells like a pizza and tastes like a pizza. In this application it's made out colored polystyrene and seasonings, so I can sell it as a zero calorie pizza substitute. In effect, let's say that it's an emulation that passes the Turing Test. Many would say that it's not a pizza, because in their definition, pizza is a kind of flat bread made out of flour, water, salt, tomatoes and cheese. These people can never be satisfied, because they are looking at the micro level not the macro level. Even if my emulation satisfies every MACRO property of the system, by definition it cannot satisfy the MICRO properties without becoming the system itself.

The same is true of thought experiments like The Chinese Room. Even though the room emulates a chinese speaker in every external or macro regard, there will be those who must look inside and insist that the room contain a "chinese knowing mind." Since it does not, it passes the Turing Test, but fails to contain the expected intelligence. As at least one philosopher has called this kind of reasoning "argument by misdirection." With respect -Joel

Loose Language Muddles Minds

I have an email subscription to "Science in the News Weekly" sponsored by Sigma Xi in the vain hope of keeping up with current developments and saw the following snippet:

"Meanwhile, the Economist reported on work at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where a researcher proposes to recreate a living organism inside a computer. His goal is to simulate a tiny nematode called Caenorhabditis elegans, probably the best understood animal in biology, and learn what triggers its pluripotent stem cells to differentiate into various cell types."

You can read the whole (short) article by following the link below:

http://www.economist.com/science/printerfriendly.cfm?story_id=9468793

However, the phrase that pushed my hot button was " a researcher proposes to recreate a living organism inside a computer." And while the following sentence mitigates that image somewhat, the actual article in the Economist further perpetuates the myth that it is possible to create life within the computer itself:

"David Harel of the Weizmann Institute in Israel ... proposes to recreate living organisms inside a computer."

And so it seems to me that even intellectually respectable organizations such as the Economist and Sigma Xi can fall prey to muddy thinking. A computer simulation of a process is not the process itself just as the pictures in Playboy are not really flesh and blood human beings. As John Searle has pointed out in his essay, "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?" (short answer: NO!!! To see whole article link to:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm

Searle points out that if you write a computer program that simulates the digestion process in a human being that is not the same as eating and digesting a pizza. (duh...)

In any case, confusing the map with the territory or math symbols with reality seems to be both a human triumph and failing.

Stu