Re: intellignece and conciousness, the one implies the other?

"bob the builder" <brulsmurf@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> can conciousness and intelligence be seperated? can intelligence stand
> alone?
> Neural nets can do intelligent tasks (recognizing licence plates etc)
> but nobody would say they are intelligent. A snake can do no such
> thing, but people contibute (at least some) intelligence to it. It
> apears that for something to BE intelligent (not PERFORM an intelligent
> task) it has to have some degree of conciousness. Yet no AI-researcher
> is trying (at least not openly) to implement conciousness. Why is this?
> is my "logic" flawed? are animals considered to be special in some way?
>
> if anyone has some thoughts about this plz share.

I believe that the problem of creating an intelligent machine and the
problem of creating a conscious machine are one and the same problem. So I
would argue that everyone working on AI is in fact working on the problem
of consciousness whether they believe it or not. I suspect there a lot of
people working on AI that would even agree with my position - but I have no
data on how many people that might be.

The problem here is that there's a large percentage of the population which
is struggling over the mind - body problem. Is the mind something special
and separate from the body? If we build a body which acts like a human,
will it be conscious? Can it act like a human but not be conscious (the
zombie theory)?

For every variation on the mind body debate you can dream up, there seems
to be someone in the world that would support that stance. Many people in
the world simply believe that AI is impossible because they belive that we
are a body with a soul and without a soul, a machine can never be
intelligent or conscious. And they believe that giving a computer a soul
is just an abusrd idea - they seem to believe that only living biological
life forms can have a soul.

Science and engineering can only deal with, and solve, the body problem.
So that's what everyone in AI understands that they are working on. And
they can work on that problem without getting sucked into the politically
dangerous mind body debate.

So, no matter how they personally stand on the mind body issue, it's best
for anyone doing research in AI, to simply not touch the mind-body problem
with a 10 foot pole. It's basically unscientific to do that.

But, a good number of people believe the body is all there is. Whatever we
have in the way of a mind, or a soul, or consciousness is just a product of
what the body does. So if you build the right type of body, it will be
both intelligent and conscious. People that believe this tend to be the
ones that work on AI. People that believe there's more to the mind and
consciousness than the right machine design, tend to stay away from AI
because they think people working in AI are working on the wrong problem.

So, I think for the most part, most people working on AI think they are
working on the problem of consciousness, but mostly for political reasons,
are wise enough not to describe their work that way, because it upsets the
people that have other beliefs about the mind/soul/consciousness.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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