[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

IBM computer named  Deep Blue.
A. The IBM computer was capable of processing 200 million chess positions per second, while Kasparov
could process three or four positions per second.
B. Moreover, the computer, unlike Kasparov, was not subject to physical phenomena, such as emotion and
stress.
C. Since chess strikes many as the quintessential activity of an intelligent being, Deep Blue offers an example
of a machine outsmarting a human being.
D. Kasparov, like Deep Blue, was the beneficiary of very special circuitry, a very special brain.
E. If Kasparov s brain qualified him as an intelligent being, why would we deny Deep Blue the same status?
II. To appreciate the burden of this question, we turn to Alan Turing s 1950 article entitled  Computing
Machinery and Intelligence.
A. Alan Turing (1912 1954) imagined an  imitation game designed to show that a machine, properly
programmed to answer questions, will be indistinguishable from an intelligent human being.
B. With stunning prescience, Turing claimed that one day the notion of machines thinking would be
commonly accepted.
C. Turing was contradicted in his own time by a Professor Jefferson who held that machines could not be
considered to have intellectual qualities unless they could create from feelings and emotions.
D. Turing refers to this objection as  the argument from consciousness. We cannot impute intelligence to a
machine unless it is conscious of its own achievements.
1. Turing examines the outcome of taking this argument to its extreme, which is essentially the solipsist
point of view.
2. Turing seems to be tracking the  problem of other minds from a commonsense position: When
something behaves and judges as we do, we assume it does so with the same psychological resources
we need to do the same.
3. If it were necessary to have direct knowledge of the consciousness attending the actions, then we could
vouch only for ourselves as having minds the solipsist point of view.
4. Turing s devices accomplish what they do in a manner that seems similar to our own
accomplishments, namely, by following established procedures and providing correct answers.
E. In his  Chinese room analogy, John Searle (b. 1932) critiques this perspective.
1. Persons ignorant of the Chinese language participate in an experiment in which they follow written
instructions on how to arrange Chinese ideograms in a sequence that makes no sense to them but can
be read by those who understand Chinese.
2. What Searle seeks to establish here is the manner in which a seemingly mental achievement is gained
by a process in which there is no comprehension whatever; it mimics the functioning of computers.
3. Searle s  Chinese room analogy tries to show the irrelevance of computational power to the question
of consciousness and intelligent behavior.
28 ©2007 The Teaching Company
4. To accept the  Chinese room analogy as establishing this is to accept that, in principle, the
achievements in the field of artificial intelligence would leave untouched all the interesting questions
about consciousness and understanding.
F. Thomas Nagel s question,  What is it like to be a bat? infers that to be like something is to be the subject
of some experience.
1. There is no basis on which to impute any of Kasparov s emotions, fatigue, and so on to Deep Blue.
2. It is not solipsism to deny consciousness to matter as long as we grant it to those like ourselves.
3. With all due respect to Alan Turing, whatever Deep Blue is doing, it is surely not thinking.
III. If Deep Blue is not thinking, is it playing a game? To answer this, we must establish just what it is that makes
any activity a game.
A. Any attempt to provide an exhaustive definition of what is a game is doomed to failure.
B. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that games are recognized for what they are only by certain persons and under
certain conditions.
1. A game might be understood as an activity that expresses certain cultural forms and norms.
2. The difference between a street fight and a boxing match, for example, is recognized for what it is only
by those understanding various conventions, instructed within a given culture, and having a developed
conception of what constitutes a  match.
C. But games are not only cultural artifacts; they involve rules.
1. There is a distinction between the actual physical constraints that guarantee a given course of action
and following a rule.
2. A restaurant s  no smoking rule would still be violated if we lit a cigarette and let it burn without
actually inhaling it.
D. Do computers follow the rules of chess?
1. Those who follow rules get the gist of the rules.
2. Following a rule is not a built-in causal connection but, rather, a conventional one.
3. A given rule will apply across a virtually limitless number of instances such that no one could find
them all in advance.
4. Computers do not  get the gist of the rules of chess. Deep Blue was programmed to have its chess
pieces move according to the rules of chess.
Essential Reading:
Penrose, R., The Emperor s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics.
Searle, J. R., The Rediscovery of the Mind.
Supplementary Reading:
Turing, A. M.,  Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind 49: 433 460.
Questions to Consider:
1. Must there be consciousness for there to be  play ?
2. What are the necessary features of an activity that qualify it as a  game ?
3. Well, do computers play chess?
©2007 The Teaching Company 29
Lecture Eleven
Autism, Obsession, and Compulsion
Scope: Knowing what happens when the functions of consciousness are defective may help us learn more about
the nature of consciousness. In order to adapt to any particular environment, a normal sensory system
resorts to active or passive filtration. This does not happen in cases of autism and other neurotic disorders.
Moreover, those with such disorders cannot come to know what it is to be like someone else through
conscious awareness and the integrative achievements of the mind.
Outline
I. Psychologists refer to our ability to continue a conversation when background noise is very loud as the cocktail
party effect, and this includes the ability to control what we listen to when different sets of sound are present at
the same time.
A. To be conscious is to be aware of something, and the process by which we are able to direct our awareness
is attention.
B. Under normal circumstances, there are two principal means by which events in the external world are
denied access to consciousness; both involve filtering.
1. One means is fixed and based on the operating characteristics of a particular sensory system.
2. The second means by which events in the external world are barred from entry into conscious [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]