Consciousness

• seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
  into imagining that a very simple table-lookup program could do the job, when
  really ‘no such program could produce the sorts of results that would pass the
  Turing test, as advertised’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 439). Complexity does matter  – so
  even if a hand calculator does not understand what it is doing, a more complex
  system, like one that passes the Turing test, could. He suggests that we should
  think of understanding as a property that emerges from lots of distributed qua-
  si-understandings in a large system (p. 439).
  We might go even further and reject Searle’s thought experiment (like the zombie
  argument or Mary the colour scientist we considered in Chapter 2) on the grounds
  that it instructs us to imagine something impossible. Searle claims that with only
  the Chinese symbols and his rule book (or even with the rules memorised and
  inside his head), he really could pass the Turing test without understanding a
  word of Chinese. But what if he couldn’t? It might turn out that symbol ground-
  ing, or learning by interactions with the real world, or something else again, is
  necessary for passing the test as well as for ‘really understanding’ a language. In
  this case, there are only two options. Either he does not have these necessities,
  and his symbol manipulations fail to convince the Chinese people outside, or
  he does, and that means he comes to understand Chinese in the process. Either
  way, the scenario Searle described in the original thought experiment might be
  impossible.
  Just as with Mary and zombies, there is no final consensus on what, if anything,
  the Chinese Room shows. Some people think it shows nothing. Some people
  think it demonstrates that you cannot get semantics from syntax alone, and that
  a machine could not be conscious simply by virtue of running the right program.
  Some (perhaps a minority) agree with Searle that it demonstrates a fundamental
  difference between the real, conscious intentionality that we humans have, and
  merely as-if intentionality. In this case, machines could be conscious only if they
  had the same causal properties as living human brains, whatever those proper-
  ties are.

HOW TO BUILD A CONSCIOUS MACHINE

Many roboticists and computer engineers ignore all the arguments and simply

get on with pursuing their ‘Holy Grail’: ‘the artificial consciousness quest  – nothing

less than the design of an artificial subject’ (Chella and Manzotti, 2007, p. 10).

There are two main ways of setting about the task. The first asks how to build a

machine that seems to be conscious; the second asks how to build a machine that

really is conscious (whatever that means).

But some say there is no need for a grand quest, for conscious artificial machines

are all around us already.

THEY’RE ALREADY CONSCIOUS

In 1979, John McCarthy, one of the founders of AI, claimed that machines as

simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs. John Searle was quick to

challenge him, asking ‘John, what beliefs does your thermostat have?’ Searle

IS THIS MACHINE

CONSCIOUS?

‘My thermostat has

three beliefs – it’s too

hot in here, it’s too cold

in here, and it’s just right

in here.’

(McCarthy, in Searle, 1984,
p. 30)