X-Message-Number: 17911 Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 19:54:39 -0800 From: Dave Shipman <> Subject: Intelligence is not the same as consciousness Hello Cryoneters, I've enjoyed being just a lurker on cryonet for some time, but at last I feel I must jump in. I'm basically a computer guy, with a long background in the AI arena. I often find myself talking with humanities-oriented folks, vigorously defending the claims of AI. On the other hand, when talking with technology types, I usually find them dogmatically dismissive of any arguments against AI and naive in their thinking about the nature of the mind. At such times, as now, I find myself arguing the other side of the fence. My main beef is failing to distinguish between intelligence and consciousness. Yes, we will build intelligent machines, with human-like behaviors, and they will pass the Turing Test. But will they be conscious? That is a completely separate question. Consciousness has to do with what your experiences "feel like". What does a banana smell like? Close your eyes and think about it, or better, go peel open a banana and sniff. I'm not talking about the neuro-electro-chemical machinations of the nervous system that correlate with that smell, but the smell itself as you know it. Now chemical engineers could build a "banana detector" that would detect the presence of banana molecules in the air, but does the machine have the same banana smell experience you have? It seems unlikely. And what of pain? From a behavioral and evolutionary standpoint, pain might be considered an avoidance reaction to harmful stimuli. OK, but then why does pain have to feel like that? Why does pain "hurt"? We could build a robot that says "ouch!, ouch!, ouch!" when it sticks its hand in the fire, but is it necessarily in pain? Does it hurt the way you or I would if we put our hand in the fire? Smells, colors, pains, etc., are what the philosophers call qualia (singular, quale), indicating they refer to the "quality" of our experiences. Qualia are the distinguishing characteristic of consciousness. The modern materialistic worldview demands that all our qualia have neural correlates, and so far that seems to be the case. If the appropriate point on the cortex is electrically stimulated, the patient will smell banana. But the induced neural activity and the smell experience are two separate things. Why one should produce the other is a mystery. The truth is, we really have no understanding at all of what this world of qualia is all about (Dennett, the Churchland's, etc., notwithstanding). It seems to lie outside our current physics. My own opinion is that understanding consciousness is the major challenge of twenty-first century science. Will we someday be able to build conscious, as opposed to merely intelligent, machines? Surely we will. The human brain is physical and is also conscious. So once we figure out how consciousness works in humans, we can duplicate it in our intelligent artifacts. But the Turing Test will not be helpful here. Intelligent behavior does not imply a conscious mind. Building conscious machines is a separate milestone in the development of artificial minds, beyond mere intelligence and human-like behavior. -- Dave Shipman Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17911