Flesh and Machines - Phoenix Goucher

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than mere machines. Often the players are strong materialists who proclaim that they are not arguing for any role from God, or a spirit, or a soul for people, and not even some elan vital, or life force. Rather they argue that there is something explicitly or implicitly more than a mere machine but which is at the same time of the material world. In order to make such an argument they need to invent some sort of new stuff. Often they deny that this is what they are doing. Below, I pick Roger Penrose, David Chalmers, and John Searle as representatives of the people who provide the most cogent arguments against people being just machines. Penrose and Chalmers could turn out to be right, although neither of them provides any data to support his hypothesis. Searle, I think, is just plain confused. Roger Penrose, the British physicist and mathematician, is certainly a hard-nosed scientist. He has written a number of books that attack artificial intelligence research as not being likely to build intelligent, conscious machines. While he might be right about that, his arguments are flawed and are certainly good examples of a "new stuff argument. Penrose starts out by making a mistake in understanding Godel's theorem and Turing machines. Kurt Godel shocked the world in the thirties by showing that any consistent set of axioms for mathematics had theorems that could not be proved within that set of axioms. Turing machines, the formalization of modern computers that Alan Turing came up with around the same time, operate within whatever set of axioms they are given. So combined, these two results say that there are true theorems within mathematics that a computer cannot prove to be true. So if human mathematicians were computers, there would be theorems that they could not prove. This rankles Penrose's pride in himself and his friends. They are all able to prove lots of theorems, so Penrose incorrectly concludes that humans, or at least mathematicians, cannot be computers. Now Penrose is in a fix. He is a hard-core materialist, but the material world cannot explain what he thinks he has observed. He needs to find something new to add within the material world that is outside the realm of ordinary computers. He hits upon the microtubules inside cells where there are quantum effects in operation. He hypothes izes, with no data to support his hypothesis, that the quantum effects there are the source of consciousness. Rather than accept the idea that consciousness is just an extension of the ideas we described in chapter 3, the result of simple mindless activities coupled together, Penrose asserts that there is some inexplicable extra thing, quantum mechanics, at play in living systems. Penrose, in his bid for scientific materialism, has resorted to a mysterious higher force. Rather than accept the offensive idea that his magnificent mind is the product of simple mechanisms playing out together, he calls into play something too complicated for us to understand fully He invents his own little deity, the god of quantum mechanics. David Chalmers, a philosopher at the University of Santa Cruz, is another hard-nosed materialist. He invents a very different type of "new stuff." In his version there may be some fundamentally new type in the universe that we have not yet observed directly He compares it to spin or charm in particle physics—properties of subatomic particles. Neither of these can be reduced to mass or charge, or any of the more usual types we have come to understand from classical physics. In his theory there is perhaps another type like these that we cannot observe directly with our senses, just as we cannot observe spin or charm. This new type may then be the basis of consciousness. Again, we see an appeal to some sort of higher authority, something different from anything that is rule-based, or mechanismlike. Chalmers appeals to something mysterious and not understood so that he can save his materialist view of the world without having to give up his specialness, to be nothing more than a mere machine. John Searle is a very well respected philosopher at Berkeley. He professes to believe that mind and particularly consciousness is an emergent property of our having a brain inside our skulls. He claims to be interested in scientific explanations. But deep down he reveals that he is completely unable to accept that anything but real neurons can produce consciousness and understanding. He occasionally admits as much, for example: In this case, we are imagining that the silicon chips have the power ... to duplicate the mental phenomena, conscious and otherwise. . . .I hasten to add that I don't for a moment think that such a thing is even remotely empirically possible. I think it is empirically absurd to suppose that we could duplicate the causal powers of neurons entirely in silicon. Beyond this his arguments get circular, although I am sure he would rather pejoratively disagree with my analysis here. His arguments are largely of the form of imagining robots and computer programs that have the same inputoutput behaviors as animals or people, and then claiming that the (imagined) existence of such things proves that mental phenomena and consciousness exist as a property of the human brain, because the robot has neither of them, even though it is able to operate in the same way as a human. This argument as I have related it may not make sense to you, but I think it is a fair summary of Searle's position. And I think the real basis for his arguments, deep down,
emotionally, is that he does not want to give up the specialness of being human. His most famous argument concerns his "Chinese Room." John Searle does not understand Chinese. He talks about the equivalent of a computer program, a set of instructions that takes inputs in Chinese and outputs answers in Chinese. Some such computer programs exist today, as long as the domain of discussion remains somewhat limited. Searle argues that if he were locked in a room with these instructions, written out in English, and a slip of paper with a question written in Chinese was passed under the door, he could follow all the rules, written up in a large book for him, and eventually pass back under the door the answer written in Chinese on a slip of paper. Searle correctly states that he, John Searle, would still not understand Chinese. He then absurdly concludes that no computer can understand Chinese. But he is making a fundamental mistake. Just as no single neuron in a Chinese speaker understands Chinese, Searle, a component of a larger system, does not need to understand Chinese for the whole system to understand Chinese. Searle goes on to deny that the whole system, the room, and he are conscious. I claim that we just do not know whether that is possible or not. In principle, I certainly think it is possible, but perhaps there would need to be some mechanism beyond just a set of rules for Searle to interpret. Of course, as with many thought experiments, the Chinese Room is ludicrous in practice. There would be such a large set of rules, and so many of them would need to be followed in detailed order that Searle would need to spend many tens of years slavishly following the rules and jotting down notes on an enormous supply of paper. The system—Searle and the rules—would run as a program so slowly that it could not be engaged in any normal sorts of perceptual activity. At that point it does get hard to effectively believe that the system understands Chinese by any usual understanding of "understand." But precisely because it is such a ludicrous example, slowed down by factors of billions, any conclusions from that inadequacy cannot be carried over to making conclusions about whether a computer running the same program "understands" Chinese. My conclusion after reading Searle's arguments is that he is afraid to give a machine consciousness. He claims it is something special about human brains and neurons in particular, but he never gives a hint of what it is that makes them special. Apart from the fact that they give rise to consciousness. He never addresses why it is that a siliconbased system cannot be conscious either, as all his arguments are circular on this front. Less sophisticated critics bash the arguments that silicon-based systems could be intelligent or conscious by pointing out that an equivalent computer could be built out of beer cans, in which each bit of information could be represented by whether a particular dedicated beer can was currently upright or upside down. Indeed such computers could be built and would be able to do precisely the same computations as any silicon computer could do, albeit thousands of millions of times slower. The argument then dismisses a set of beer cans as being intelligent as patently obvious, and so demolishes silicon computers' being intelligent. Like Searle's Chinese Room, there is no real argument made against a beer can computer being intelligent—mere ridicule is used. Sort of like the idea that the world can't possibly be round because everyone in Australia would fall off. Ridicule does not make a valid argument. Ridicule instead of reason is a well-known refuge for tribalism. Really then, most people's arguments about whether a robot can ever be conscious or have emotions are driven by people's own emotions, by their own tribalism. As Damasio argues, our reason is driven by our emotions.. And that is true even when we are reasoning about our emo tions and those of our machines. Ultimately the arguments come down to core sets of unshakable beliefs. My own beliefs say that we are machines, and from that I conclude that there is no reason, in principle, that it is not possible to build a machine from silicon and steel that has both genuine emotions and consciousness. Is There Something Else? Although I have derided the use of "new stuff in attempts to explain how we are different from machines, we are still left with a dilemma, and I will now use my own "new stuff argument to hypothesize a way out of it. Even worse, I will not supply any data to back up this argument—exactly my criticism of both Penrose and Chalmers. We know that our current robots are not as alive as real living creatures. Although Genghis can scramble over rough terrain, it does not have the long-term independence that we expect of living systems. Although Kismet can engage people in social interactions, eventually people get bored with it and some start to treat it with disdain, as though it is
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Page 7 and 8: Earth. That was mankind's place in
Page 9 and 10: As Hollywood caught up with what wa
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Page 17 and 18: come up with something he was not e
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Page 21 and 22: uild a working machine that is just
Page 23: Sims, K. 1994. "Evolving 3D Morphol

Flesh and Machines - Phoenix Goucher

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