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>Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance.

It's not so much the difference between polynomial and exponential complexity. It's the difference between a coinductive (ie: infinitely looping, like a game loop) computation that adds new information to its "memory" in each iteration (which sounds monadic), compressing its inputs to accommodate that information, and then generating an output... vs a super-exponential lookup table that performs the input-output mappings without actually engaging in any side-effecting or monadic computation at all.

So yes, when you think of these two vastly different ways of writing down a "cognitive-style" computation, it becomes clear that one of them maps relatively well to what we think of when we say "mind", while the other doesn't, and Searle is conveniently eliding the distinction.

Hm why does adding information to memory sound monadic to you? I am not questioning you, but just curious. My knowledge of monads is limited.

I would argue that Searle's Chinese Room is posed in a way that presupposes what forms computation might take or the limits it has. Since this was posed decades ago (1980), it makes sense in his time. If Searle had begun teaching today (instead of 1969) and seen convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks deployed in massive data centers, Watson win Jeopardy!, neural Turing machines, or a worm's brain emulated and embodied in a small robot, I doubt he would have posed his Chinese Room the same way. Maybe he would not have posed it at all, being convinced in light of those achievements.

This is the first good refutation of the Chinese room I've encountered. This was never mentioned in the "Minds, Brains, Machines" course I took, so I don't think it's talked about as much as it should be among philosophy of mind circles?

>This is the first good refutation of the Chinese room I've encountered.

Really? I'd think that the fact that someone saying 'lookup tables aren't thinking' without ever saying what thinking is would be presenting an obviously self-refuting argument.

Like a judge saying "I know crime when I see it: I don't have to write down what it is." It's simply not a basis for rational decision making, so it's certainly not a convincing assertion.

The fact that anybody thinks the Chinese room is an interesting philosophical quandary is far more interesting. It means these are primitive times and you don't actually need to be very smart to beat the competition.

>The fact that anybody thinks the Chinese room is an interesting philosophical quandary is far more interesting. It means these are primitive times and you don't actually need to be very smart to beat the competition.

There are genuinely competent people doing competent work in the field of philosophy. They just don't make up enough of the peer-review boards to throw out everyone who isn't as competent as them.

The continuing influence of mathematical logic and its attendant "general axiom to specific theorem, As Above So Below" style of thinking does not help.

The whole Turing Test thing is massively overblown. It's a thought exercise and not a particularly great one. It's gotten completely out of hand, with Kurzweil, Chomsky, Searle etc all weighing in.

Computer passes Turing Test, Human fails Turing test - vice versa - that's all there is to it.

Yeah well, context is king. The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on their internal structures isn't very fair, since that's not how we judge humans. There's no real way of knowing about other people's "qualia" or whatever you want to call it. To skirt that problem, Turing suggested a behavior-based approach.

I think we probably judge others to be conscious actors in more ways than this though. We probably accept that other people have "qualia" from the fact that we have it, and then we kind of learn that our parents have it, and so on, until it's not a huge leap to generalize that to all of humanity. Of course it's not like people have always assumed the same kind of "qualia" for all of humanity, in a lot of conflicts this has probably been thrown out of the window so it will be easier to kill your enemies. Either way, it's probably quite complex how we determine that other people are conscious, Turing tried to skirt the metaphysical issue (that we can never really know, this goes for both humans and other machines). I think this was a huge step in the right direction.

"Computing machinery and intelligence" wherein the test is outlined, with background. aka "The Imitation Game"

http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.HTML

> The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on...

That wasn't the aim at all, again I think you are reading way too much in to it. The aim was to pose a test that would fool people.

Alan Turing:

"an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes"

"The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

The test is a very simple thought exercise where he shows a machine will be able to pass for a human, and a human will fail to identify a machine. That's it. No questions of consciousness, metaphysics! In fact he dismisses such questions in the paper.

His belief was that in 50 years time, the words may have changed, and people's opinions about what constitutes thinking would have changed to the point where: someone could say "a computer thinks" without challenge. That hasn't happened, when somebody says "a computer thinks" they are saying it with tongue firmly in cheek. Maybe in another 65 years time his belief will come true.

You're essentially saying what I was saying. That Turing tried to throw metaphysics out of the window in favor of a practical approach (behavior-based = fooling a human).

As for public perception of consciousness or "thinking", time estimations are usually quite sketchy.

Nope. We disagree fundamentally on the aim of the Turing test. Sure we agree things were thrown out the window, we agree it's a practical test. You think its aim is a fair way for judging machines to be conscious.

I think it's a thought experiment to show that machines are going to be able to fool an average human for some small length of time eventually. That's a lot less grandiose.

A mistaken interaction with an IRC bot or an automated phone service has the same net effect.

Hm? "I think this was a huge step in the right direction." I guess what I am arguing is, that if there's any fair test, it has to be practical and not metaphysical, that's why I think the Turing Test is a step in the right direction. Do I make the claim that the Turing Test as-is is fair when it comes to determining "consciousness" by any reasonable and practical manner? No.

If I am reading what you are saying correctly, I surmise that you're saying that the Turing Test doesn't say anything about consciousness, but rather, is just about the probability of a machine being able to fool a human. I am saying that the reason why Turing even ponders the question is that there's no good way of definitely answering if a machine (or another human for that matter) is conscious or not. So that leaves the ability of being able to fool (or convince) other thinking machines that one is intelligent (or conscious) as the only viable metric.

I feel like most of this is mainly semantics. I too, don't believe that one can actually determine the consciousness of anyone but oneself. However, we do convince ourselves that other humans are in fact conscious, so it's still interesting to try to figure out what it would take for us to do that, and then apply the same standards to machines.

I love the Turing Test. Not as a test of intelligence - that's boring and it's not entirely clear what it means anyway - but as a subversive test of personhood, which is what most people are really interested in anyway.

Personhood rights are ethical and granted by society as a whole. A well administered Turing Test gives the computer intelligence a chance to argue for treatment as a full person, without the prejudices that would normally be attendant on the fact that it's instantiated in electronics.

Even if you started completely against machines having rights, once you've allowed one to convince you that it's human-equivalent, you've much less room to rationalize away poor treatment of it.

See my response here, you are also reading way too far in to it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085587

It doesn't give a computer any chance to argue for treatment, it's about whether or not an average interrogator will be fooled by it.

Sure machine rights are an interesting thought - but the Turing Test as outlined in the "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" paper isn't related to machine rights. Anytime a computer says "no" without good reason to "sudo shutdown now", the plug will be pulled on it.

I agree with you that it isn't clear that the Turing Test has any meaning whatsoever. I'm not sure there ARE great implications from machines eventually being able to fool humans. Plenty of things can fool humans, paintings, mirrors, animals. And not all humans are equal in determining whether they are interacting with another human or not.

I'm sure you're right about what Turing intended the test be used for, but I think the question of whether a machine can fool a person into treating it like another person absolutely has relevance to the question of machine rights.

And unlike 'intelligence', there are concrete steps to be taken given some answers to the question as to what rights a particular program should have.

> can fool a person into treating it like another person

"perceiving something as something" and "treating something as something", different verbs. Turing tests aren't about treatment, they are about perception.

The field is wide open for thought tests or games on how to "treat" computers so I would say knock yourself out and make a better one.

The Turing test doesn't do a whole lot of good at answering those questions or for that matter any questions. Other than "will a computer be able to fool a human eventually".

The notion of machine rights existing at all is evidence that Turing's prediction that the way intelligence is thought of would change, but still most people would challenge the idea that computers think.

Maybe in another 65 years that will change further - and machine rights will no longer be a fringe idea.

> "perceiving something as something" and "treating something as something", different verbs.

Well yes, but if you perceive something as something that you will treat it as if it were that thing. And that is exactly what would happen during a successful Turing test - the computer would be treated as if it were a human by the judge.

your position is trivially falsifiable - mistakenly interact with an irc bot or an automated telephone service as if it were human, then on realisation - you treat it like a machine again.

"..representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning... consciousness is some sort of sophisticated, elegant computation ..." -- But would it love?