[Synapse elist] Response to Ada et. al.

[Greg Hooper]

I'm struggling a bit to write about this stuff in an email without
appearing terse or wanky or irrelevent - so upfront apologies for the
style.

I've never been that attracted to a 'computational realist' vision of
the universe although obviously mathematical models and their
simulation are very attractive tools. It is important to keep that
difference in mind. re experience -  Is experience something that
leaves a trace but does not in itself persist. (The scar is the sign
of experience but not the experience itself.) Is experience what it
feels like to get a trace, what it feels like to record a trace of the
interaction between ourselves/ (parts ourselves) and the environment
(which might be an internal environment) .

My turn to provide some references regarding automaticity which is
relevent to ideas of choice :)
Bargh, J.A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of
being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479.
which you can dig up as a pdf on the net.
There is also a nice book "The new unconscious" Hassin, Uleman, Bargh
(eds) but the Bargh and Chartrand covers pretty much everything.

re Ada - I guess for me 'choice' is a little loaded politically and
also raises the infinite regress to the homunculus - just who is that
makes that choice - where are they? I'd rather just think in terms of
'response' although that word too has some negative connotations
(unemotional behaviourism). But regarding
the emotions and choice, I like Edelman's (?) term 'value systems'
(which fits in with extra-cortical strutures), the idea of which comes
out nicely in this article by Cosmides and Tooby - the bit on fear is
great
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/emotion.html
What then of interpreting the behaviour of some AI construct? (which
hopefuly relates to Erika's post as well)
If we are going to go beyond 'mere' description of the external
behaviour of some organism of thing then I guess we have to bring in
goals - ie make the assumption that the AI has some sort of agency -
at least the ability to initiate behaviour and have goals. In which
case we have a big history of describing animals, ourselves and others
to draw on.
It's the problem of other minds - We understand the internal states of
any organism by inference and extension from our own. I sometimes
think that the prototypical 'phobic' animals - spiders/snakes are such
because their observable behaviour (particularly the way spiders move
for instance) is so different to our own that it makes prediction
difficult. If the observable behaviour sits poorly with the observable
behaviour of our kin then we are going to have trouble imputing goals.

So what of non-human intelligence? - as per my earlier post and the
reference to Solaris - if we only have their behaviour to go on then
we are no differently put than when we try to ascribe intentions or
intelligence to a spider or another person. But take an extreme case -
say there is something like a sea-sponge. We notice there is an
exchange between the sponge and it's environment on the sorts of
scales that make us think it is alive. Then we notice that whenever we
come close to the sponge we remember our childhoods. And this is the
case for 70% of the people who come near it. Is the sponge influencing
our thoughts? If so, is that an indication of agency on the part of
the sponge? or is it just a visual trigger of our memories?

But from the automaticity research there is a lot about our own
communication that is just triggering memories in others. Is the
ascription of agency just an admission that we do not understand
mechanism - just as Clarke said that sufficiently advanced
technologies will appear as magic?

If this is so then the division between AI and human intelligence or
agency or experience is just one of degree rather than kind. At the
biological level  - choosing a ripe pineapple (yum) or following the
chemical gradient of an 'attractant' (like a bacterium). We describe
our experiences to ourselves and others and somehow that makes it seem
as if those that don't describe are lesser beings with some unexamined
life.

That's okay - we'll examine it for them.






On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 3:26 PM,  <ahenskens at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
> ---- Erika Lincoln <fur_princess at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> dear Erika
>
> I found that last remark of your profoundly interesting.  In fact, the whole discussion has opened up a whole new vista!
>
> ada
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