Re: The Demise of Computationalism?

Stephen Harris <cyberguard-1048@xxxxxxxxx> wrote on Fri, 09 Mar 2007:
There are thousands of papers and books which disparage and defend Comp,
and its parent, The Computational Theory of Mind (CTM).

In the philosophy literature, no doubt you are correct.

My claim was always that within the group of _AI_researchers_, CTM is the
dominant philosophy -- assuming they bother to think about the subject at
all. Probably the same for cognitive scientists, although I'll admit to
being less familiar with that field.

But I never meant to make any claim about what most philosophers think on
the subject, or even the general public.

For instance, the Chinese Room Argument (CRA) produced 1,390,000 hits
when googled. Humans are not dealing with a fact of the matter, that
"cognition is computation", but a philosophical position. So it is a
matter of opinion. And the CRA was factually immensely influential.
It doesn't really matter at all that you think the CRA is flawed. A
few thousand papers have been written which debate this.

Sure, sure, I grant that Searle's CRA thought experiment has been hugely
influential. In philosophy, and perhaps with the general public.

At the same time, I doubt it's changed the course of a single AI research
project, in these last decades.

On top of that, it factually is a broken argument, merely reinforcing
existing prejudices (on both sides), without actually "proving" anything.
It's an appeal to intuition, not an insight into the real world.

It is a fact that thousands of papers have been written and debated which
criticize the philosophical foundations of Computationalism. That is just a
fact.

Yes, I can agree with that. I'm sure many such papers have been written
in philosophy departments.

Searle writes:
"Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will
be so intelligent that we will `be lucky if they are willing to keep
us around the house as household pets'.

I agree that this is wildly optimistic. AI has a horrible track record of
predicting future results. Intelligence is a much harder problem than anyone
in the field originally realized.

My all-time favorite in the literature of exaggerated claims on behalf of
the digital computer is from John McCarthy, the inventor of the term
'artificial intelligence'. McCarthy says even 'machines as simple as
thermostats can be said to have beliefs'. And indeed, according to him,
almost any machine capable of problem-solving can be said to have
beliefs. I admire McCarthy's courage. I once asked him: `What beliefs does
your thermostat have?' And he said: `My thermostat has three beliefs --
it's too hot in here, it's too cold in here, and it's just right in here.'
--- J. Searle,"

Searle is a strident, biased, anti-AI philosopher. His writings are
propaganda and rhetoric, not an objective view of the true situation.

That said, I believe McCarthy's quotes are accurate.

SH: There is something quite corrupt in the core of a philosophy that
can be manipulated to assign consciousness to teddy bears, beliefs to
thermostats and a mind to an abacus.

You haven't even explored the philosophy, to so abruptly dismiss it as
"corrupt".

Even if you don't respect me, John McCarthy surely has a sufficient track
record that you owe it to actually read and understand his position before
casting it off with such negative comments.

If you bothered to look into what McCarthy has actually written, you would
see that he's attacking the notion that there is something "special" or
"magical" about human intellect, something qualitatively different from
machines. Instead, McCarthy argues, it's just points of complexity along the
same spectrum. Thermostats have "a little" belief, humans have "a lot".
There is no magic step #N where machine N does not have beliefs, but with a
minor improvement in some critical functionality, machine N+1 suddenly does.

This philosophy is at least reasonable to consider, and is by no means
obviously "corrupt in the core".

Most people are going to deem such attributions as ludicrous.

The opinions of "most people" are not important to the truth of the claim.

The majority opinion is that people who embrace Comp are deluded, not the
source of insight and respectable opinions. Comp is an airy-fairy figment
of the imagination similar in plausibility to the idea that there is no
matter, it is all a projection of mind. It is perpetuated by Mensan
academics who are stuck on their own intellect.

Well, at least this isn't a direct ad hominem attack on me, but only an
indirect one, via association. :-)

Perhaps we can stick to the merits of the various claims.

And that Turing's assertion which implied that a program which passed
the TT, that there is no good objection to considering it to have human level
intelligence. This is not even a theory because it is not
falsifiable. There is no test for mind.

You're right. Turing's paper where he described his Test is not a scientific
theory.

The idea that one can assert that a program has a mind if it can pass the
TT, and then build a program that passes the TT and then, conclude, Wow,
the program must be instantiating a mind, is a bit too circular for
objective thinkers.

Yes, that is indeed circular reasoning. I would never argue that the
Turing Test provides a definition of mind.

If a successful TT program is ever engineered, it will still do nothing to
resolve the dispute of whether the program has a mind or is a zombie.

You may have a point there, although I suspect in the court of public opinion
it will be a lot harder to the average person to deny an entity that
strenuously asserts its own consciousness.

Where has your head been during the onslaught of Anti-Computationalism?
It certainly can't have been in the area of keeping abreast of how
Comp is being received because you had already pigeon-holed that idea.

I agree that there are plenty of people who object to Computationalism.

Few of them are AI researchers, however. That has been my main point.

"The Dark Ages of AI: A Panel Discussion at AAAI-84
Drew McDermott, M. Mitchell Waldrop, B. Chandrasekaran, John McDermott, Roger
Schank
This panel, which met in Austin, Texas, discussed the "deep unease among AI
researchers who have been around more than the last four years or so ... that
perhaps expectations about AI are too high, and that this will eventually
result in disaster."

Sure, but what does this have to do with Computationalism?

There was a whole "AI Winter" in the 80's (which I lived through), that
was about government funding drying up, mostly because of unmet promises
from the AI projects in the 70's which never came to pass.

But that's got no connection with our current topic of discussion.

"Meanwhile, the 1984 meeting of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence had a panel discussion on "The Dark Ages of AI." This appeared
in AI Magazine for the fall on 1985. The field was running low on new ideas
and the business community was getting stale about AI's commercial
promise. ...

That's all true, but is about short-term (e.g. a few years or decades) of
concern about engineering approaches. It's not at all a comment about the
overall philosophy that minds are computational.

"Hans Moravec has defended in this list indeed the idea that even a
teddy bear is conscious.

I'm not familiar with this claim, but absent the surrounding context, it's
hard to evaluate in isolation.

On this newsgroup, for example, Curt has claimed that rocks are "conscious",
but he says that more to point out the problems with the definitions that
other people assign to that word, than to make any interesting claim about
rocks.

I'm pretty sure that both Curt and Moravec don't think that rocks or teddy
bears have the same level of subjective experience as humans.

SH: I've seen your defense of the view that a mind will be required
to pass the Turing Test, tied to some statements by Turing.

Yes, that's correct.

You are one of the victims that this article talks about:
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/blayw/tt.html

How so? I actually agree with almost everything in that article.

I've said many times on this very group that the Turing Test is merely a
sufficient test for intelligence/consciousness, but not a necessary one.
Whitby, in that paper, is quite correct to note that research projects which
pursue an imitation game ("the Turing Test") are almost certainly
non-productive at this point in time. (I've criticized the Loebner Prize,
which is a "restricted" form of the Turing Test, in this group recently.)
Moreover, it hard to imagine that it will ever be worthwhile to engineer a
real system to pass a real Turing Test.

Whitby has a great analogy, that if there were a Turing Test-like contest
for flight, where the goal is to imitate a bird, it seems likely that mankind
is unable to pass this test even today. Despite our success with fighter
jets and spy planes and rocket ships to the moon.

Real AI isn't about trying to pass the Turing Test, no question.

(But all that is separate from the philosophy question of, _if_ a system did
manage to pass the Turing Test, would it _then_ necessarily have a mind?
I will continue to profess my belief that yes, it would need to have a mind.)

http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/blayw/tt.html
"One conclusion that is implied by this view of the history of AI and
Turing's 1950 paper is that for most of the period since its publication it
has been a distraction. While not detracting from the brilliance of the paper
and its central role in the philosophy of AI, it can be argued that Turing's
1950 paper, or perhaps some strong interpretations of it, has, on occasion,
hindered both the practical development of AI and the philosophical work
necessary to facilitate that development.

I think he's overstating the "hindered [...] development" part. I think only
a tiny fraction of AI researchers bothered to try to write programs directly
to pass the Turing Test.

But sure, it's a distraction for real AI research.

Thus one can make the claim that, in an important philosophical sense,
Computing Machinery and Intelligence has led AI into a blind alley from which
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Note: that's the magazine which published Turing's paper. He's not
criticizing the research fields of computing machinery or intelligence.

it only just beginning to extract itself. It is also an implication of the
title of this chapter that the Turing test is not the only blind alley in
the progress of AI."

Sure. I don't object.

How does this relate to anything we've been talking about?

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people
do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be surprised.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
.

Relevant Pages

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