Turing, AI and ESP (1/2)

[jporter]

Seb:

(snip)

> The nice thing about the Turing game
>is how it shows that there's an assumption that a "mind" is
>operating whenever anyone(thing?) says something to us: this
>"mind" assumption carries with it the notions of privileged and
>incorrigible access, and a machine can use this weighty
>assumption against us, to fool us that it is human.


Exactly. John Searle would call this an "observer relative" phenonmenon-
i.e.,  dependent on the mental "frame" of the observer, as opposed to an
observer independent phenonmenon, like those things studied in classical
mechanics, which have an independent existence. It is the whole strength
behind his formulation, and what I was getting at in my statement about the
machine being "lent" intentionality by the humans in the loop.

(snip)

>My argument is that ESP only presents difficulties because it's
>not like this, it's not a matter of saying whatever the hell you
>like with no fear of contradiction.  Answering ESP questions is
>not incorrigible talk about your own mind.

Yes! It's ironic in a way, but ESP, as ephemeral as it seems at first,
actually turns out, in the context of the Turing Test, to be THE most
objective measure of the state of being referred to as a self-interested
observer. It undermines the process I alluded to, above- the borrowing of
intentionality by the machine- because it demands an intentional but
observer independent response, which the machine, being only oberver
relative, cannot provide.

> But then a typical
>machine could just as well be knocked out of Turing's game by
>failing to respond well to "Could you go down the shops and see
>if Camels are still at reduced price?" - because the designers
>had neglected to give it legs or wheels!  Sure, the machine could
>be programmed to respond cleverly to this sort of thing (e.g.
>"I'm recovering from a stroke and can't walk without
>assistance"), but then it could respond just as well to ESP
>questions (e.g. "I've never shown any psychic abilities").

No. The machine, if advanced enough, would be able to parse- "Could you
go..." as a non-allowed request in the context of the test- three
intelligences in isolated rooms, connected only by terminals.

(snip)

>ESP is only a sticking point because answering ESP questions is
>like _really_ going down to the shops and reporting the price of
>Camels: it's making a corrigible statement: in contrast to a
>statement like "I feel down today", which would make the observer
>nervous of responding "no you don't, you're just a machine
>programmed to say that" - nervous because it just _might_ be a
>human saying that, and breaking the convention of treating
>others' statements about their own state as privileged and
>incorrigible is rude and hurtful.

Yes.

> Breaking that convention is
>almost equivalent to ceasing to treat the other as human.  It's
>this convention that the machine in the Turing game uses against
>the observer.

Or, as you say, not taking it for granted that intelligent responses are
indicative of humanity, which is the whole strategy in a nutshell, and its
brilliant. If we admit that the machine is intelligent- able to make
intelligent responses that make sense- but, we can tell it is not human
because it flunks E.S.P.,  Turing has won, anyway. Intelligence can be
artificial. If the machine is able to interact intelligently, and we are
unable to tell if it is a machine- because we don't have E.S.P.- he has won
an even stronger victory. It is the initial separation of intelligence from
humaneness that is his goal. The existence of E.S.P. is not important,
except that if it does exist it would be an interfering variable that would
make the sensitivity of the test: as a measuring apparatus for machine
intelligence, questionable. That's why he suggests "telepathy proof rooms."
Once the test is completed, the "telepathy barrier" could be removed, the
human could tell- by using "human only" E.S.P.- that it's a machine, but it
wouldn't make any difference. Machine intelligence would have been proven.
E.S.P. is not at all mysterious to Turing in this context, it's just a
potentially pesky and confounding variable that might get in the way of
detecting the presence of artificial intelligence. Implicit in the very
design of the test is the recognition that "it takes one to know one," vis
a vis intelligence.

(snip)

>This is a special thing about ESP: it's not just not understood,
>it carries a whole lot of baggage that makes it something you
>might hope is never understood.  I think Turing's mention of it
>is confusing because of all this baggage.  Being capable of ESP
>could be made just as unproblematic in the Turing game as having
>legs and being capable of going down to the shops, _if_ ESP was
>understood.  But if it was, something else would have to take its
>place as the rallying point for the intuition that no machine can
>fully reproduce a human being.

But that was not Turing's goal. He was really much nore interested in the
logical requirements- the specific structure of the hardware and the
software- required to pull off a successful simulation as measured by his
hypothetical Test. The possibility of the reality of E.S.P. was a problem
for him, because it was another potential, albeit difficult, variable
needing to be controlled and held constant, in order to detect what he was
really trying to measure. He was an amazingly cool and logical character.
One wonders if he felt that there was evidence for telepathy based on his
experience at Bletchley Park during the war. The extreme urgency of that
mission, and the absolute vital necessity for secrecy and unbreakable
codes- Bletchley worked both to break and protect codes- must have required
them to consider the possibility that E.S.P. was real, and to test for it,
in order to protect their work. Also, the problem of keeping the fact that
they had broken ENIGMA a secret, while still using the information gleaned
to turn the tide of the war, must have required a sensitive appreciation of
what appeared random (to the enemy) and what sequence of events might be
contaminated with traces of intentionality- something a E.S.P. might be
able to detect.

cheers

jody