191 replies to this topic

[furrykef]

I don't see how my situation being hypothetical invalidates my argument. Even if it's not actually possible for humans to build such a machine, I really don't think it will be because consciousness is some magical thing that cannot be replicated by technology. It would be some other, more fundamental snag, like the inability to simulate something as complex as neurons using mere transistors. If we did somehow manage to build something that works like a human brain, we would need to put no effort into giving it consciousness, because consciousness would be a logical and necessary consequence of the system. The problem would take care of itself.

There's a famous thought experiment in AI called the Chinese Room. (It's funny that I can bring this up now, because it came to mind last night for different reasons.) Suppose there is a man in a room. This man does not speak Chinese. He receives notes slipped under the door in Chinese. He takes a note and opens a very large book and follows a very complex set of rules to produce a response, also in Chinese. (We're in fantasy land here; we don't need to worry about things like how big the book is or how long it would take a human to follow the rules.) Some of the rules might be as simple as "when you say character A, write down character B in your response"; others may be far more complex. It does not matter, so long as the final result is indistinguishable from how a human might respond in Chinese. (In other words, it would pass the Turing test.) So then he produces his response and slips it back under the door. A Chinese speaker who does not know what's going on inside the room would probably think he is talking to someone who knows Chinese.

Now, surprisingly enough, this argument was originally constructed to try to show that a machine could not be said to have intelligence. It doesn't understand Chinese; it's just a man (or CPU) applying a set of rules. But since then people have put more thought into it and reached the opposite conclusion: we are like the Chinese room. Just as the system of the Chinese room taken as a whole has the outward appearance of understanding Chinese, you and I have the outward appearance of understanding English. Now, we know that the Chinese room is just a man with a book -- but we also know a brain is just a mass of neurons, applying a complex set of transformations to its input and producing output. Different mechanism, same result.

"But that's different!" I hear you cry. "Human consciousness is something special! I can feel it!" Meanwhile, in our hypothetical universe, someone is having a similar conversation with our Chinese Room. "My consciousness is something special!" the room cries. "I can feel it!"...

[RedAuthar]

Except you take apart the room you find a man inside answering the questions. You build the room up again you can continue. The room had no consciousness, only the man inside.

You take apart the human being and life and consciousnesses are gone forever. We know the exact (or at least pretty close to it) chemical make of the human body and all it's organs. In theory we can "build a human". However upon building a human we can not give it life. Without life there isn't consciousness.

Any machine you make can only be as intelligent as its creator or creators. Sure the computer can access data at a faster rate then a human, but all that data has to be put into it first. Sure I can ask Siri to text my friends however Siri only recognizes data I give her or key data that the programmer gave her.

This is the illusion caused by the true Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain in the back of the room. We can make it seem real, seem possible, but there is one part science can't seem to emulate. Machines can not be conscious because we can not replicate consciousness.

"But hypothetically" you say. Well if you can "hypothetically" give humans the ability to give machines consciousness, "hypothetically" there must have been some being who gave humans consciousness. The Machine didn't just wake up with it. Why would the human?


Also to respond to your earlier comment about Science explaining things better then religion....
Science could technically be classified as religion. Religion truly is just away to explain "How things came to be" and "What happens next". Science does the same. Science is as much religion as religion is science.

Also nobody said God had to be an all powerful wizard who uses magic to bend reality to his whim. Perhaps god is nothing more then a master Scientist, creating things using the biological programming that gives us life.

Truthfully Science and Religion aren't opposite sides of the same coin, they are the same side of the coin. The difference is how you perceive the image upon it.

[Uncle Ben]

i think i may opened Pandora's box......

But what do you guys think of that "science quiz" i posted in the very begining

[RedAuthar]

i think i may opened Pandora's box......

But what do you guys think of that "science quiz" i posted in the very beginning

Honestly I believe it is an unfair quiz assuming that the student actually read the bible (unless of course the teacher had assigned reading the bible as a text in the class in which the parents would have already known about it as it would have been in the syllabus they students received at the beginning of the year).

[Uncle Ben]

i think i may opened Pandora's box......

But what do you guys think of that "science quiz" i posted in the very beginning

Honestly I believe it is an unfair quiz assuming that the student actually read the bible (unless of course the teacher had assigned reading the bible as a text in the class in which the parents would have already known about it as it would have been in the syllabus they students received at the beginning of the year).

According to the story the parent had no clue she was being taught this

[RedAuthar]

According to the story the parent had no clue she was being taught this

Well then my opinion stands that 1) The teacher was an idiot, 2) the test is very unfair, and 3) Somewhere along the lines the Principal really *butterscotch* up. I mean how could the other teaching staff not know? Students aren't going to keep it secret from each other and through that alone other teachers can find out which would lead to the entire school finding out. Regardless if the Principal approved this method of teaching or not, they really screwed up in the fact they didn't know.

[Uncle Ben]

According to the story the parent had no clue she was being taught this

Well then my opinion stands that 1) The teacher was an idiot, 2) the test is very unfair, and 3) Somewhere along the lines the Principal really *butterscotch* up. I mean how could the other teaching staff not know? Students aren't going to keep it secret from each other and through that alone other teachers can find out which would lead to the entire school finding out. Regardless if the Principal approved this method of teaching or not, they really screwed up in the fact they didn't know.

It was a school somewhere in the south where the bible is higher than science so "Science" is actually teachings of the Bible. The South has the lowest science tests scores in the US. (And Massachusetts is #2 behind California)

[RedAuthar]

According to the story the parent had no clue she was being taught this

Well then my opinion stands that 1) The teacher was an idiot, 2) the test is very unfair, and 3) Somewhere along the lines the Principal really *butterscotch* up. I mean how could the other teaching staff not know? Students aren't going to keep it secret from each other and through that alone other teachers can find out which would lead to the entire school finding out. Regardless if the Principal approved this method of teaching or not, they really screwed up in the fact they didn't know.

It was a school somewhere in the south where the bible is higher than science so "Science" is actually teachings of the Bible. The South has the lowest science tests scores in the US. (And Massachusetts is #2 behind California)

Look there are only two possible answers here. Either the School screwed up for not realizing what was going on or the parents screwed up for not knowing what was going on. Either the parents didn't pay enough attention on what was going to happen in the class or the School didn't pay enough attention to what was happening. Regardless of the location of the school, the school and the parents should have known and since the parents didn't it must have been a goof up on their own part or the school's part.

[Uncle Ben]

i think its a little bit of both

[RedAuthar]

Yup.

[furrykef]

Except you take apart the room you find a man inside answering the questions. You build the room up again you can continue. The room had no consciousness, only the man inside.

You take apart the human being and life and consciousnesses are gone forever. We know the exact (or at least pretty close to it) chemical make of the human body and all it's organs. In theory we can "build a human". However upon building a human we can not give it life. Without life there isn't consciousness.

So you define consciousness as the inability to be reconstructed when you take it apart?

Any machine you make can only be as intelligent as its creator or creators.

Why, then, am I able to construct a program that beats me at a board game every time?

Sure the computer can access data at a faster rate then a human, but all that data has to be put into it first. Sure I can ask Siri to text my friends however Siri only recognizes data I give her or key data that the programmer gave her.

This is the illusion caused by the true Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain in the back of the room. We can make it seem real, seem possible, but there is one part science can't seem to emulate. Machines can not be conscious because we can not replicate consciousness.

"But hypothetically" you say. Well if you can "hypothetically" give humans the ability to give machines consciousness, "hypothetically" there must have been some being who gave humans consciousness. The Machine didn't just wake up with it. Why would the human?

I'll have to come back and address these points later. I was going to do it now, but I ended up writing the next part of my response first, and it was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.

Science could technically be classified as religion.

Oh God. I hate it when people say this so much. I just explained how religious ideas and scientific ideas propagate entirely differently. They cannot be equated.

Religion truly is just away to explain "How things came to be" and "What happens next". Science does the same.

But science can be proven. Hypotheses and theories can be tested. If something cannot be tested, if a result cannot be verified, it's not science.

Here I have to tread very carefully, because it's actually a bit of a mistake to say that a scientific theory can be proven. Newtonian physics was disproven, for instance, by Einstein's theory of relativity. Aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity have in turn been called into question. However, neither Newton nor Einstein were completely wrong, since Newton's laws and equations still hold for virtually everything in everyday life, and relativistic effects can clearly be observed and must even be accounted for in systems such as GPS. (You see, relativity predicted that time would be faster in orbit. GPSes carry atomic clocks that do, in fact, run fast compared to the same clocks on earth by 38 microseconds per day. The GPS satellites have to compensate for this discrepancy or they would become completely useless very quickly.) So nothing is absolutely 100% ironclad in science... but we can still be really darn sure about quite a lot of things, since experiments have lined up well with predicted results again and again, and even when it turns out we're wrong about those things, we turn out to be a little wrong, not completely wrong. The system we use to sort out what we consider "correct" or "proven" for most purposes is called consensus.

Religion doesn't work that way. Religion has no system of consensus. If it did, there wouldn't be so many disagreements over the most fundamental things! Try getting a Christian and a Hindu to agree on anything. They'll argue endlessly over whether there's just one god or many, whether there is reincarnation, whether good people will go to heaven and bad people will go to hell, and whether it's horribly wrong to eat a hamburger. Neither will ever convince the other of anything because they cannot prove their points. It will come down to, "My book says...", "Oh yeah? Well, my book says..."

Of course, scientists disagree on things all the time too. That's how science gets done. But in so doing we build up consensus, things that everybody agrees on. Anything that is not yet consensus is either just a work in progress or not worth pursuing. There are many religions -- Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Shintoism, and on and on, all in eternal conflict. (I'm using "conflict" in a loose sense here, not referring to wars, but to incompatibility of ideas.) There aren't multiple schools of scientific thought. There's just the one.

Science is as much religion as religion is science.

So... not at all? Religion is 0% science, therefore, according to what you just said, science is 0% religion. If any aspect of religion were scientific, it wouldn't be called religion. It'd be called science.

Also nobody said God had to be an all powerful wizard who uses magic to bend reality to his whim. Perhaps god is nothing more then a master Scientist, creating things using the biological programming that gives us life.

That's true. Science does not disprove God, nor does it try to. In fact, a true scientist, atheist or not, would be just as eager to prove the existence of God as he would be to disprove it, if he believed he had an opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, no such opportunities have arisen. It appears that the only way to prove it one way or another would be for a god to actually show up and prove his existence. So far this has not happened to scientists' satisfaction. So what do scientists do about it? The only thing they can do about it: ignore the matter.

So yes, science and religion aren't fundamentally incompatible. They are still entirely different things.

[Uncle Ben]

i really opened Pandora's box didnt i

[chief]

Ohhhh the science vs religion debate. . . . again

I'm not really going to get too technical here just say my bit and leave. You disagree with me whatever. Your choice. Unless you are Red, then I'm firing your ass Cause I can! NYAHHH

I believe church and state should be fully separated. I even know some religious people here on FUS (past and present) who believe the same thing. Church and state should not be combined. Too many different religious beliefs out there plus a number of other things.
However what is one thing that all people have in common? Religious or not.. That would be science. We live it every day. We see chemistry every day. Without chemistry we wouldn't have our sun. We can't go against the laws of gravity no matter how hard we try... Doesn't matter on your religion.. Everyone is equal when it comes to science.

Now we want to see what happened long long ago by..Apparently the bible. Okay. But why the bible? Why not the Koran? But you know...Both of those are actually fairly new books.
So okay now we journey back farther in time. God, or Zeus or someone was always there just for stuff that people didn't understand. Zeus throws lightning.. Does that mean that the current God sits up there throwing lightning down on earth? Or does it mean that religion was wrong in the past? That people changed what the ancients believed to suit their current situation.

As for both religion and science being equal.. Well no. Most religious leaders today even believe in evolution. I think Pope John Paul II was the first big one to come out saying that there was too much evidence pointing towards evolution to deny it. In fact the Vatican has scientists who actually study evolution.
This is because most religious leaders today believe that we did not just pop into existence on how we are. We evolved from a bunch of goop.
Even look at your own body. You have evolution going on as we speak. Take Wisdom teeth for example. Hundreds of years ago our skull could fit them. Now we can't (ok a few of us can). But that brings to the point that if throughout history our bodys evolved. Otherwise you would see a shit ton of people dying due to those damn teeth coming in. Be the worst design ever. Actually some people don't even get their wisdom teeth. And that is quite simply because we are in the cross roads of evolution. You see 3 types. One type where the teeth have enough room to fit. The middle type where the teeth must be removed. And of course the last type where they get no wisdom teeth to speak of.

Now if we were created as is... Thats poor design.

For that matter look back to the middle ages.. Most armor suits only stand like 5 feet high. Why? Well people were actually quite a bit shorter back then. Evolution has carried mankind to where we stand.

Now I have been just sort of rambling here...And I have nothing against religion or else I'd be going all evil and calling Red a loser and firing him and breathing fire and all that. Cause I'm sure science will let me breath fire! YEA!
basically people believe what they want to so that is cool. If the world was more tolerant to everyone else out there then.. Be a bit nicer. But probably more boring..
Anyways back to my original thing.. Church and state should be fully separated. No good comes of a government run by their religious views and no one elses.

[RedAuthar]

Also nobody said God had to be an all powerful wizard who uses magic to bend reality to his whim. Perhaps god is nothing more then a master Scientist, creating things using the biological programming that gives us life.

That's true. Science does not disprove God, nor does it try to. In fact, a true scientist, atheist or not, would be just as eager to prove the existence of God as he would be to disprove it, if he believed he had an opportunity to do so. Unfortunately, no such opportunities have arisen. It appears that the only way to prove it one way or another would be for a god to actually show up and prove his existence. So far this has not happened to scientists' satisfaction. So what do scientists do about it? The only thing they can do about it: ignore the matter.

Ignoring the matter does not prove it wrong. It just proves at the moment scientists are unable to study it, such as at this moment in time they are unable to study other planets as accurately as they'd like. The difference here is scientists are perusing methods when it comes to planets and not perusing methods for proving god (probably because it would spark a controversy that would be outta control).

So yes, science and religion aren't fundamentally incompatible. They are still entirely different things.

I think my previous definition for religion explains this away.

i really opened Pandora's box didnt i

Yes. Yes you did. And you probably really shouldn't have.

I'm not really going to get too technical here just say my bit and leave. You disagree with me whatever. Your choice. Unless you are Red, then I'm firing your ass Cause I can! NYAHHH

*Butterscotch*!

[Captain Sorzo]

There's a famous thought experiment in AI called the Chinese Room. (It's funny that I can bring this up now, because it came to mind last night for different reasons.) Suppose there is a man in a room. This man does not speak Chinese. He receives notes slipped under the door in Chinese. He takes a note and opens a very large book and follows a very complex set of rules to produce a response, also in Chinese. (We're in fantasy land here; we don't need to worry about things like how big the book is or how long it would take a human to follow the rules.) Some of the rules might be as simple as "when you say character A, write down character B in your response"; others may be far more complex. It does not matter, so long as the final result is indistinguishable from how a human might respond in Chinese. (In other words, it would pass the Turing test.) So then he produces his response and slips it back under the door. A Chinese speaker who does not know what's going on inside the room would probably think he is talking to someone who knows Chinese.

Now, surprisingly enough, this argument was originally constructed to try to show that a machine could not be said to have intelligence. It doesn't understand Chinese; it's just a man (or CPU) applying a set of rules. But since then people have put more thought into it and reached the opposite conclusion: we are like the Chinese room. Just as the system of the Chinese room taken as a whole has the outward appearance of understanding Chinese, you and I have the outward appearance of understanding English. Now, we know that the Chinese room is just a man with a book -- but we also know a brain is just a mass of neurons, applying a complex set of transformations to its input and producing output. Different mechanism, same result.

We understand English in a similar manner, yes, by following a complex set of rules. English itself, as with any language, is chiefly a tool, however, a means of communicating emotions, and ideas. Those things aren't achieved by following sets of rules. That's even the case with aspects of language. I often find beauty in what I read, whether due to the subject matter or simply the way it is arranged. There's no rule indicating that a certain turn of phrase is beautiful. From a purely objective standpoint, Shakespeare's writing is no better than the sentences a first grader might copy from the board at school. Both are grammatically correct, after all. They follow the rules.

Being able to perceive language as an art form is something that simply following the rules cannot teach, not on its own. The man in the Chinese room will never be able to use the book to find beauty in Chinese poetry or literature. If he does, it is because he formed an emotional connection on his own. The book helped communicate what was needed to form that connection, but it didn't create it. If a different person followed the same rule book and read the exact same poem or novel, his reaction would not be identical to that of the first person.

The initial analysis of the Turing Test is still valid. The machine might be able to mimic human behavior, but it is only following a set of rules, only imitating rather than experiencing. Human consciousness is so much more than what can be externally observed. I know this because of my own mind. Because it stands true for me, I reason, it must stand true for other people as well. Yet the only mind I have direct access to is my own. I cannot know other people directly, but must make constant inferences based on the rules of communication and my own mind.

Let's say that my friend tells me his parents just died. I do not directly feel his sorrow. Yet based on what he communicates (words, tone, body language), I know with a very high degree of certainty that he is sad. A sufficiently programmed machine could do the same. What a machine could not do, however, that I can, is create a simulated version of his sorrow. Based on how I know grief to feel like due to what I myself have felt in the past, combined with how I think I would feel if in the same circumstances, I can actually feel some approximation of my friend's emotions.

A machine could soothe and state how sorry and sad it is all it wants, but it could not experience that sorrow itself. It could feel empathy, perhaps, but never sympathy.

i really opened Pandora's box didnt i

You essentially started a thread saying, "Hey! Let's discuss some extremely controversial topics that radically shape the fundamental worldviews of countless people!" What did you think would happen?

[Uncle Ben]

i really opened Pandora's box didnt i

Yes. Yes you did. And you probably really shouldn't have.

I'm not really going to get too technical here just say my bit and leave. You disagree with me whatever. Your choice. Unless you are Red, then I'm firing your ass Cause I can! NYAHHH

*Butterscotch*!

I didnt think it be that bad

Haha

[RedAuthar]

Eventually we'll all lose interest in hearing what the opposition has to say because we're steadfast (or perhaps to darn stubborn) in our own beliefs.

[Captain Sorzo]

Eventually we'll all lose interest in hearing what the opposition has to say because we're steadfast (or perhaps to darn stubborn) in our own beliefs.

That, and these things have been discussed for decades in detail by far more knowledgeable minds than our own, with neither side achieving conclusive victory (save, perhaps, in their own minds). If the greatest experts in the world can't settle the matter, a handful of people posting on a Sonic message board certainly can't.

[chief]

High five for being stubborn! Wooo!

[Uncle Ben]

(high fives Chief)