[ExI] Searle and AI

[Samantha Atkins]

On Dec 27, 2009, at 1:24 PM, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> 2009/12/27 Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>
> Even if Zeus handed us a concrete example of an artificially constructed machine with strong AI, we could not abstract from careful study of that machine a formal program to run on a software/hardware system that would enable that s/h system to also have strong AI. We would need instead to recreate that machine.
> 
> I am perhaps not following this thread closely enough to decide whether I agree with that statement, but I suspect I do.
> 
> In fact, either one drops an exagerately anthropomorphic view of "intelligence" (with projections such as "conscience", "agency", etc., which are already quite problematic to extend to the other organic brains); or I believe that the only way to deliver what he or she considers as "generally intelligent" would be to create a relatively close emulation of a human being.

I disagree with both of those statements.  A system with a self-reflective model of its own actions and state as part of the state considered for decision making will exhibit what we think of as conscience, agency and so on given enough power/complexity and time.  It will by design have "strange loops".  This is of course my intuition but I will happily bet that I am correct if you can create a valid test of whether this is true or not.  :)

> 
> Accordingly, it might be marginally easier to emulate at increasing levels of fidelity a *given* human being (thus producing what for all practical matters would end up being considered soon or later as un "upload" or a "mental clone" of the original) rather than artificially recreating one from scratch (i.e., probably by patching together arbitrary pieces of different and/or "generic" individuals).
> 

A human being is a biological machine exhibiting all those aspects which Searle and his ilk claim seem to claim no machine can exhibit.   Or at any rate that standard programming cannot exhibit.  I may agree with the latter but not with the stronger statement.

- samantha

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