I worked on computerized vending machines that used cellphone technology to place orders for re-stocking itself. Feed me, says the machine.
PartSkeptic,
Does the
machine really say Feed me? Think about it for a few minutes.
If I were to write the word Hello in rocks on a beach and you saw them without seeing anyone around..... would you then conclude that the Beach was saying hello to you? Would you conclude that the rocks were saying hello?
Who in fact is saying hello? Is it the person who arranged the rocks or is it the beach?
Now consider the vending machine situation again!
Is the machine saying feed me? Or is it the person who WROTE the program (i.e. arranged some bits in the machine) that then sent out the symbol "Feed Me"?
So as you see the machine is not alive or conscious or even acting or saying or anything.
The machine is only MACHINING what sequence of physical movements that were "MACHINED" to eventually send out a SYMBOLIC arrangement of things that when VIEWED by a human being are INTERPRETED as the words Feed Me and then given content significance in relationship to what those symbols mean in the case of another human saying the words.
One of the problems with the way humans think is this OVER PROCLIVITY to attribute AGENCY to things...... it is called HYPER AGENCY attribution.
We instinctively are more likely to attribute agency to things when there is in fact none. We evolved that way from the ancestral days when the rustling of the grass or a movement in the sky could have been a predator trying to snatch us at a moment of inattention. The ancestors that were more jittery and tended to believe the movement in the grass was predators when most of the time it was not, tended to live longer due to OVER CAUTION than the ancestors who were too lax and assumed one too many times that it was the wind or a cloud.
So you see we have the INSTINCT of attributing AGENCY to things.
We also are a very social animal and tend to attribute INTENTIONALITY and minds to things because when we were still apes our survival depended on the TRIBAL system and within the tribal system there was a hierarchy of individuals and the one that could form more strategic alliances climbed to the upper crust of the hierarchy. Thus we developed this ability of attributing emotions and feelings to OTHERS as we ourselves feel and the person who could manage to understand, anticipate, manipulate the emotions and desires and INTENTIONS of others played the game of chess of tribal interactions much better than the ones who were less inattentive.
Thus these two traits of attributing agency and mind to others work very well for survival against dangers from WITHIN and WITHOUT the tribal unit and lead to better reproductive opportunities.
Thus we are the descendants of the ones who were more likely to HYPER attribute agency and mind to things.
So given this tendency we are more likely nowadays to ANTHROPOMORPHIZE things. That is why a while back people selling rocks as pets made a fortune and priests still have an endless supply of children to bugger and sheep to fleece.
Let's go back to this situation of a machine acting as it was DESIGNED to act and we see the words coming out of it.....what do we do....we hyper anthropomorphize it and think that SHE is speaking to us. But in fact it is as dumb as the rocks on the beach that appeared to be saying hello.
It is not the machine that was saying Feed me...... it was the programmer who wrote the program that resulted in the machine eventually machining out a symbol that another human saw and interpreted and HYPER anthropomorphized the machine.
No machine so far has EVOLVED language. No machine has assembled itself and then managed to churn out the words feed me in a language that is not the language of its designer.
Consider human languages. Why is Chinese so Greek
for native English speakers? How is it that Chaucer is incomprehensible to a modern English speaker?
I went to London with my ex-wife once. She was from a Bostonian Irish stock who spoke much like the Kennedys. At the hotel the porter spoke to her while I was doing something else and asked her something. She came over to me and said that she could not understand the porter at all. I assumed that the guy must have been foreign but when I asked him to repeat what he was saying I realized that he was a Londoner speaking a perfectly normal London accent (it was not the BBC English mind you). My wife could not understand a word he was saying even though she was an American-English native speaker (granted she was not the brightest of humans).
So how is it that an American who speaks nothing but English only 300 years down the track could not understand the English?
Can machines do that? Would computers ever evolve to speak a different machine language than the one they were
designed to do? I can anticipate a person who knows nothing about microcode and cpu design perhaps ignorantly saying “why not”.
Conscious entities did not have other conscious entities make them and assemble their components and then program them. The only conscious entities here on this earth and in this reality have EVOLVED and whatever symbolic output they ever do was not written in their brains by entities of a totally different kind.
A wolf evolved its own symbology for communicating with other wolves and did not have it inserted in the brain by dinosaurs or dolphins. Dolphins evolved their conscious abilities to interact with their kind by themselves and did not have something wire their brains to do so.
If a machine ever comes close to appearing to be conscious it would be only an ILLUSION and a TRICK that fooled HUMANS because another human made it do that by exploiting the HYPER AGENCY ATTRIBUTION tendencies of humans .
A machine that fools people into believing that it is conscious is only doing so because another human DESIGNED it to do so.
Whatever our consciousness is and whatever caused it and however it emerged and whatever it means or entails or however it behaves it is OURS....it AUTO EVOLVED from US and anything that is manmade that appears to be LIKE US is only an ILLUSION.
And no.... the analogy with the bacteria helping us with our metabolisms that you drew in another post is invalid..... the bacteria in us EVOLVED ALONG with us.... they evolved to need us and we evolved to need them......we CO-EVOLVED.....the bacteria did not ENGINEER us as their habitats.
Whatever machines we make, it would be to do something utilitarian for us, not for them..... so if the machines that we manufacture interact with us it is due to the way WE designed them to be. The bacteria in us did not design us according to their plans.
In my
opinion Machines will never become conscious..... they will become more and more adept at IMITATING us to the extent where they would be a PERFECT ILLUSION fooling us into thinking they are conscious. But it will always be a VIRTUALITY and not Reality........the reason is that WE MADE them that way..... we created them....we designed them...... and thus anything coming out of them is BY DESIGN and not auto-evolved.
Adding randomness to a program where it would output things we did not specifically code in the program is more like the roll of a DICE and not consciousness. If we throw ten ten-sided die we would be quite surprised if they came out arranged as a phone number we recognize....but we do not conclude that the die consciously did that. We manufactured the die and they did something unexpected but you can hardly call that intentional on the part of the die.
A computer program that surprises you is only doing so because YOU INTERPRETED its results not IT consciously tried to output something significant to you so as to deliberately convince you that it is conscious or even communicate with you.....just like the die…. The program was doing what it was designed to do due to the way someone manipulated it to
machinate.
Machines will never have INTENTIONALITY that is not the result of the DESIGNER’S DESIGN of the machine.
You might say…aha…. Do you then believe that humans have free will….. no I do not…. Dogs and Wolves and rabbits have intentionality but do you then attribute to them free will?
I
conjecture this word INTENTIONALITY might be an interesting aspect of consciousness.
Whatever intentionality (or more precisely the illusion of one) a manmade machine might display, it is only the intentionality of the DESIGNER who fabricated and coded the machine to do the actions to appear as if it is intending to act. And lest you jump in with the randomness aspect producing actions not previously specified by the designer….remember the dice roll.
Animal intentionality was not designed it EMERGED as a result of the evolution of the animal.
