Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Once upon a time Searle, a philosopher, argued that artificial intelligence couldn’t be intelligent no matter how we programmed it.

The thought experiment goes like this: Take an English only speaking person and lock him in a room. Put a slip of paper under the door with Chinese markings posing a question. In the room is a rule book for translating the Chinese questions into Chinese answers. The person finds the symbols matching the question, copies the appropriate answer onto the paper and slips the paper back under the door. Since the person does not comprehend what he is doing it is not intelligent nor is he conscious of what he is really doing. Therefore programming a computer to do something does not make it intelligent or conscious, it is just simple pattern matching.

Early on in the days of artificial intelligence this was a compelling argument. Now we have software that teaches itself through weighted networks not unlike our brains and it learns things we didn’t put in the code.

This fall we have a book put out by Harvard professor Wegner “The Illusion of Conscious Will” who argues that consciousness is but an illusion. His argument is that the brain convinces you it is not a machine.

“When you drive to work, you don’t feel there are hundreds of little gears in a machine in your head that make you do this. You think, ‘I’m going to get up and go to work,’ ” Wegner said in an interview

“We think the intentions cause the actions, and we get the feeling we have willed what we do. It could be the intentions and actions are being caused by the machinery of the brain.”

So if we only think we are conscious and the machine is showing behavior we did not program into  has it already achieved consciousness?

More information:
A new thinking emerges about consciousness
The Chinese room argument