Artificial Intelligence; Chinese Room Thought Experiment

What is really going to confuse you is that conciousness is not a particularly neccessary property. It has been known for some years now that the brain makes the subconscious decision to fire motor neurons and control our movements before we make a concious decision to do so. Admittedly this impulse occurred a few milliseconds before the concious thought and only with motor control, but resent research has demonstrated the patterns in brain activity in the pre frontal cortex proceed concious intent up to 10 seconds prior to a persons awareness of their decision.(Branan, N. 2008, Scientific American Mind, Unconscious Decisions, August/September 2008, p.8)

It would appear at the moment that all choices we make are decided by the lower functions of our subconscious, and our higher brain function merely exists to confabulate, explaining to ourselves why we made such a choice. The interesting argument at the moment is, did the high brain function come into existence before or after our advanced communication skills. In other words did we learn to have abstract thought then talk about it, or did we learn to talk and start having abstract thoughts?

Also in response to liberated1's brain replacement scenario engineers do have computers capable of mimicking the operation of neurons, ANN's are an abstraction of the human neuron, and although they work with differing potentials rather then frequencies, they are used in industry and research for pattern recognition tasks. Mathematical ANN models exist and are most common as they are easy to implement on processors optimized for parrallel computation such as DSP's, but if you wanted a pure hardware example; a network of non-inverting summing amplifiers will do the trick, simply alter the ratio of the input resistances to the feedback resistances to reflect the difference in neural wieghtings and TA DA, you have a system capable of pattern recognition that learns by example and can generalise examples in to different classes just aswell (in some cases better than) tradition statistical feature extraction techniques.

[VladTheImpaler]

Philocynical wrote

What is really going to confuse you is that conciousness is not a particularly neccessary property. It has been known for some years now that the brain makes the subconscious decision to fire motor neurons and control our movements before we make a concious decision to do so. Admittedly this impulse occurred a few milliseconds before the concious thought and only with motor control, but resent research has demonstrated the patterns in brain activity in the pre frontal cortex proceed concious intent up to 10 seconds prior to a persons awareness of their decision.(Branan, N. 2008, Scientific American Mind, Unconscious Decisions, August/September 2008, p.8)

Is that to say that there is no such thing as a conscious decision? This doesn’t sit well with me, rather counter-intuitive.

Am I (what I perceive as me, my consciousness) simply reduced to an observer trapped in a physical body?

Fascinating post Philocynical, thanks!

[a different tim]

Did you see any of the stuff Gnosital was posting about this a year or so back? There were a whole load of threads on free will, decision making and the like. I know she argued that there was no such thing as a conscious decision. You might want to google "Libet experiment" as well.

Strictly speaking, I personally would argue that there is no such thing as a "decision" at all, except maybe in the quantum realm. And quantum randomness certainly doesn't count as "conscious".

I'm not sure the notion as you as an "observer" trapped in your physical body makes sense. That view of consciousness is known as "Cartesian Theatre" and as far as I know the neurological evidence that consciousness is not like that.

I'm not sure why this is connected with the Chinese Room though. The Chinese Room argument is that consciousness cannot be captured by computation.

conciousness may not be possible with a conventional processor, but it has been demonstrated that the subconscious is making our decisions for us, a concious mind is not necessarily necessary to perform the actions that we world class as human behaviour. As such people are just like a computer taking information, performing instructions (although these instructions may just be the effect of neural weightings on nerve impulses), and providing an output. The only difference would appear to be a huge ego sitting atop of this system going "Honestly I know why I just did that, really!!!"

Until we understand what conciousness and sentience is we may well be unable to copy it. However, I would argue that unless you are an advocate of Cartesian Duality (which I very much doubt on an Atheistic forum) then it can one day be copied simply from more accurate observations of the brain in operation. Although when this day comes it may be that we find the concious mind we have created is rather redundant!

[a different tim]

Oh make no mistake, I'm with you. I'm no Cartesian dualist, I'm with Turing on this isuue as I thought I'd made clear. However I think Searle was arguing that consciousness is a material process which cannot be captured by computation, rather than for dualsim. Having said that, I don't actually buy the Chinese Room argument.

We did some stuff on this here (and in several other places - it was a major topic across a lot of threads a while back - but the stupid search function appears to have lost them).
Gnositall and "Scathach" on that thread were the same person by the way. She changed her name with the mods' permission.

Well to be honest I don't really agree with Turing his test is just plain silly. We didn't get flying machines by trying to copy birds, and we won't get thinking machines by trying to copy people! I understand what you mean about the Chinese Room argument thou. It occurs to me that if the instructions given to the English speaking person in the room remain constant, but pictures are included with the written material , the person may be able to work out the meaning of a few of the Chinese words. However, a computer performing the same task would not, no inferred knowledge and what not!

Ta for the link!