Blog Entry #1: Minds, Brains and Programs

Commentary

See what I have to say about Wesley's and Bain's work.

References

Searle, P. (1980). Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417-457.
Chinese room. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Dijkstra, E. W. (1984). The threats to computing science. Proceedings of the Acm 1984 south central regional conference (pp. 3). Austin, TX: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF.

Article Summary

In this article, Searle sets out to disprove the possibility of strong artificial intelligence (AI), specifically that a computer program cannot display cognition as a human brain could. He does this by setting up what is known as the Chinese room, a thought experiment in which Searle is locked in a room and knows no Chinese, and yet is able to convince an outside observer that he does. Given a set of Chinese characters and a set of English rules for manipulating them, Searle states that he can receive input in Chinese, apply the English rules based on what he sees to create new Chinese data, and pass this data to output as acceptable Chinese.

Searle also addresses some of the common arguments against his position, and finally addresses the question of what he believes understanding to be. He repeats his assertions from the beginning of the article: that "intentionality in human beings...is a product of causal features of the brain"; and that "instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition of intentionality." He concedes that it may be possible to "give" a computer the facilities that make him, as a human, intentional, but still maintains that "formal symbol manipulations by themselves don't have any intentionality...."

Discussion

Sometimes, when I dive into things like the Chinese room argument, and I start getting all metaphysical and stuff, I start to feel a lot like this :

Image courtesy of xkcd.com

In all honesty, I'm with Dijkstra:

...the question of whether Machines Can Think...is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

I really don't feel that it matters whether or not we create machines that exhibit strong AI or are capable of cognition or are intentional or whatever. As long as we're discussing thought experiments, given an unlimited amount of processing and memory resources, and a program covering enough inputs and their appropriate outputs with enough complexity, weak AI will always be strong enough for anything we really need it for. I mean, I'm all for helping the elderly cross the street or carrying groceries for the single mother with three kids:

Image courtesy of imdb.com

But once we start trying to capture the human essence and start thinking about machines as humans, who are to be afforded the same rights, who are to be worthy of the gift of our love, we run into some serious issues:

Image courtesy of imdb.com

I'm just sayin'.