Turing, AI and ESP (1/2)

[jporter]

Seb, your post was interesting and I intend to respond to all your main
points. This will not be for those on the list with short attention spans,
or low batteries : -)

>I've been following this discussion, and can't say I've followed
>precisely enough to butt into a particular post and refute
>it...but, backtracking a great deal, I don't really buy Turing's
>ESP argument at all.
>
>The way it's been presented suggests that Turing is saying
>something along the lines of
>
>"ESP (which I, Turing, believe does occur) is a major obstacle to
>my goal, which is to argue for the possibility of
>x.   A machine may well (if not now, then in the future)
>participate as well in the game I have described as a human
>would."

OK  so far.

>(this "game" may well be what I've heard of as the "Turing
>test").  "as well", here, means "such that the human in the
>observer role in this game would not be able to identify the
>machine as a machine rather than a human being".

Clarification: There are three players- the machine, a human and another
(observer) human- who must decide who is the other human and who (which?)
is the machine, by asking questions of them both, using a keyboard and
terminal.


>Turing sees a hypothetical "telepathy-proof room" as one solution
>to this obstacle.  So what he seems to be saying is
>
>1.  Humans have an ESP faculty which they could use in this test.
>2.  A machine (any machine) would not have this faculty.
>3.  Therefore, the human observer could ask questions that
>require the use of ESP, and thus distinguish between a machine
>participant and a human participant.


For example: "What card am I holding up?" Etc.


>3. implies that Turing's contention (that a machine _could_
>impersonate a human) is wrong - this is how Turing presents it,
>as a counter-argument to his.

 In other words, your saying: If E.S.P. is real, it's a threat to the
validity of the "Test," and since Turing is "rooting for the machine," he
is looking for a way to get around the E.S.P.-Human advantage.

>The thing that strikes me most obviously in this argument is 2.,
>which seems to be a completely unwarranted assumption.   OK it
>does seem plausible, if we all imagine for a moment that we do
>believe in ESP, that a machine would not have this faculty.
>However, replace "has an ESP faculty" with "can enjoy strawberry
>ice-cream", "can fall in love", or any of the other standard
>attributes of humans in this type of argument, and then the
>argument seems quite lame - in fact, an argument addressed and
>disposed of elsewhere in the article.

You cannot so simply replace "has an E.S.P. faculty" with "can enjoy
strawberries and cream-" which is a static datum. The machine could be
programmed to respond randomly to "food" questions- either like or dislike
to varying degrees- and store the reply in memory, so as not to contradict
itself in case it were asked again. E.S.P., apparently, is dynamic and
synchronous and cannot be randomly faked.

>
>Turing is right, I think, in identifying ESP as a major obstacle
>to his contention.  This is because his contention (as he makes
>clear at the start) is not "can machines think" but "could a
>machine participate in this game so as to give the impression
>that it is human" - and the game is constructed such that any
>human attributes (falling in love, liking strawberry ice-cream
>etc) _could_ be simulated by the machine (using the word
>"simulated" is already to invoke a whole shed-load of philosophy
>of mind, but let it pass, please?).

No problem with avoiding the "mind" problem- Turing purposely uses
imitate/simulate to short circuit the infinite regress of the think/mind-
"is your red my red-" conundrum. Of course, he implicitly equates
successful imitation with "thinking" anyway. He seems to realize that,
given the framework he's specified, one can't prove the difference. If it
walks like a duck...

>This is because the game is
>based on verbal, very purely verbal (e.g. typed so as to appear
>on a screen) responses to questions.

(Ah, he was prescient...wasn't he? He would have been good on the P-list.)

> A lot of interesting issues
>arise about whether the machine could answer questions so as to
>persuade the observer that it does fall in love, like ice-cream
>etc.  Even more interesting when the next question
>
>Could the machine answer these questions "humanly" consistently,
>get it "right" (i.e. "human") every time?  If it can, there's
>another question raised as to what exactly constitutes _really_
>being capable of falling in love, liking ice-cream etc (easily
>glossed as "what constitutes being _really_ human") beyond such
>consistent behaviour.

One gets the feeling that he is challenging the way we take these concepts
for granted amongst ourselves, as much as making the theoretical case for
their imitation by a universal Turing machine, now known as a  programmable
digital computer,


>
>Anyway, my main point is that ESP is a major obstacle to Turing
>not because it's ESP, but because it's slightly outside the
>framework of the game as he set it up.  If ESP is not
>allowed/doesn't exist/is prevented by a telepathy-proof room,
>then the questions remain questions of a particular form:
>questions that ask the respondent to report their response -
>questions that are asked from a standpoint of ignorance: the
>"observer/questioner" knows nothing about the respondent except
>the respondent's answers, and the respondent knows nothing about
>the observer except the questions.

But the observer's task is precisely to detect which is the human and which
is the machine. Any question may be asked or answered in any way,
including: Are you telepathic?  This is a no holds barred- every
intelligence for itself- contest. Lying is permissible, if not encouraged
(What could be more human?). There is only one end point: Can the observer
discrimminate which intelligence is natural and which is artificial using
only the keyboard and screen. E.S.P., if it exists, is not outside the
framework of the game, because it is already present in the humans. If
anything, using a special room which just happens to be telepathy proof,
whatever that might be, stretches the rules. The presence of the second
human, who is supposed to help the interrogator, by contrasting with the
machine, actually could end up lending more credence to the machine,
especially if the human's ESP skills are not up to spec, and s/he guesses
in a worse than random fashion. Over short stretches, that might make "HAL"
seem like the telepathic. Remember, Turing indicates that he thinks the
evidence for E.S.P. is overwhelming. But, he does not actually say that it
has been proven. He has about the same level of confidence in its existence
as he has in the future possibility of A.I.  However, he categorically
states we must wait for the technology to reach the point where the
experiment is worthwhile attempting, then actually doing the experiment and
seeing what's what. At that time, E.S.P., if it is a real "human only"
phenomenon, would be a thorny obstacle for the machine. In Turing's view,
the true nature of our cognitive talents- whether or not they are
determined and capable of being wholly imitated by discrete state machines-
might only be discerned when dsm's are powerful enough to imitate us with
sufficient accuracy to make such subtle differences between us and "them"
apparent. This would mean, of course, that E.S.P. is not a deterministic,
programmable phenomenon, and so not in the repertoire of a dsm.

(end part one)