Week 6

   Artificial Intelligence

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do." 

HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey)

   Can a machine be intelligent? Can we create a complex program enough to "feel" and "think" for itself? Is it possible to "create" mind from the pure matter or is it needed a "something" else?, and above all... How do we define what we would take as evidence that a machine can think or not? The Turing test establishes that we can consider a program "smart" if it can hold a conversation and the interviewer cannot distinguish it from a human being under conditions that he/she cannot see any of the two respondents. John Searle tried to answer the Turing's experiment with the Chinese Room:

   Suppose there is a locked room with a slot as the only communication with the outside. Within this room is someone who cannot speak Chinese. At the same time there is a vast library of Chinese encyclopedias that indicate which ideogram is the response to another. If someone from the outside introduces an envelope with a question in Chinese, the person inside the room will search through the books until he/she finds the corresponding ideogram as a response and returns it to the outside. Can the person who is out and get the answer conclude that the person who is in the room "knows" Chinese? If the door is never opened always left with the doubt, and for practical purposes the answer is "yes, he/she knows Chinese" because we assume that if something works in an intelligent and conscious way is because it is smart and aware.

   How can we determine if a machine is intelligent or not? If we make the comparison with human capabilities, sooner or later we will hit the uncomfortable fact that the machines surpassed us on several fronts long ago. However, for something to become intelligent as a human, it makes sense to bet on emerging behaviors that were not be scheduled, but we would enter into a kind of contradiction because we would not be creating a machine piece by piece, but only certain parts that would open the possibility for new issues to arise. In fact, the intelligence is characterized by the ability of self-perfection on the basis of experience; therefore we could never create something clever at all, only the core for the emergence of that intelligence.

   A machine could be programmed to react to a blow like a human: can scream, move, and hold the place where it was beaten, but without feeling pain, then, although we could implement more features, the machine would lack of the more human feature: the ability to have mental experiences firsthand.

   Qualia would be this, the subjective sensation of pain, and subjective experience of other sensations. They are the most mysterious events of human consciousness. They are somewhat personal, not transferable, and characteristic of the individual. The mystery of qualia, so tied to the human, comes from the fact that they are not explainable from a physicalist reduction. Consciousness or awareness is the capability of experiencing these qualia or feelings, and if these cannot be simulated, we must admit that there is "something" that is specifically human, something intangible and independent of the matter. Almost all philosophical positions, including the psychoanalysis, give to the consciousness of oneself a shade almost magical, but science has quite simple and concrete definitions of consciousness as it is a self-monitoring of unconscious psychological processes, or the view of oneself as an object in the world. If the mind and human emotions are a consequence of the actions of the brain as a complex processor system, why should not happen something similar as a result of other complex processing system?

   According to Roger Penrose, quantum mechanics is involved in the phenomenon of "consciousness" and that's not magic, but it is virtually impossible to replicate it artificially in a current machine, so there will not be artificial beings now, but perhaps in the future. Less than 100 years ago it was unimaginable to think that a machine could play and win at chess to a human...

Week 5

Mind and Matter

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind"

George Berkeley (Anglo-Irish philosopher, 1685-1753)

   Of all the mysteries of the universe, perhaps the most intriguing resides in the center of our being: the mind. Throughout history, dualism has been defended by philosophers like Plato, who believed that an immortal soul survived the body, Aristotle, who believed that the soul was the shape of the body but the two were inseparable and when one disappeared, the other also did, or Descartes, who believed that man consisted of two substances, res extensa (material) and res cogitans (thinking) joined by a gland called the pineal.

   Currently, the dualism of mind and body is defended primarily by religion to explain the immortality of the soul through life after death. Many philosophers and scientists defend the dualism of body and mind, such as cognitive psychology or mentalism, they believe that the mind rules the brain and there is no physical theory to explain consciousness, the mind is like software on the hardware. The physical explanation of the mind and human consciousness is probably the largest and most important scientific challenge of humanity, and maybe quantum biophysics can find the physical basis of consciousness. On the contrary, the evidence for the existence of the mind would allow other intangible realities such as the soul and the spiritual realm.

   However, dualism is unable to explain the interaction that occurs between the body and mind: how the mind, if not physical, can produce a change in a physical domain (violating the principle of conservation of energy). Also, if the mind is immaterial it would be impossible to influence it by physical means.

   Physicalist theories try to answer the mind-body problem by denying the dualism and arguing the lack of mental entities, or the ability to identify entities, attributes and material processes (ontological dimension), or the need to translate our mentalist language into a physical language (semantic dimension) or the possibility of reducing the psychological explanations about mental states into physical and organic explanations (epistemological dimension).

   The root of these physicalist theories are at the same time, in Cartesian philosophy: if the body- according to Descartes- functions as a complex machine, could the mind also be explained by similar mechanical principles? Scientists claim to be able to map the brain and to know where are centered the processes of thinking. The stimulation of a certain point of the brain can cause a sensation or particular reaction. Scientists are working hard to prove this in an effort to show that the life of the immaterial mind can be physically located within the physical object we call the brain. They say there is really no difference between what we call the brain and what we call the mind, and therefore there is no difference between what we call body and what we call soul. In essence, the immaterial world is simply a figment of our imagination. In this universe there are only two things: matter and energy, and both are physical, there is nothing spiritual. The body is subject to physical laws, and memories are recorded in neurons such as the information of a PC is on the hard drive, thus memories are also matter.

Week 4

Knowledge

"All theories are legitimate and none of them are important. What matters is what one does with them"

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentine writer and poet, 1899-1986)

   Knowledge is a way of asking and answering questions that recognize multiple points of view. Throughout the history of epistemology, there have been many ways of understanding knowledge: a theoretical knowledge where there is plenty of reason and logic but very little action taken, a practical knowledge built without any reasoning from the experience, the practice, the day-to-day, or an intuitive knowledge where the logic is out of place and emotional and unconscious elements play an important role. This is sometimes more powerful than any other knowledge built with logic and reasoning.

   Ideally, the reason, heart and action should go together in order to build the knowledge, but this denies the reality: our imperfection to know. However, even though imperfect, there are a thousand ways to learn and build knowledge.

   Knowledge is in the person, not in anywhere else, and is indistinguishable from the person. What I know is the sum of all my life experiences, absolutely all of them which have left a residue at any time. It manifests itself in everything we do, in what we say, in what we do not say, in what we dream...

   There is not knowledge, for example, inside a book. A book can build, contribute, and enrich so much knowledge as different interpretations that its readers make of it. The person who writes it know what every sentence means, but prior knowledge of each reader will make that the words, phrases and ideas are interpreted in one way or another. Sometimes the lack of prior knowledge makes that the reading of the book does not tell us absolutely nothing, in other occasions, a limited prior knowledge makes that the reading of the book tells us little, but often occur that the prior knowledge of the reader creates exciting new interpretations of the text: applications to other fields (perhaps unimagined by the writer), relations with other concepts and ideas, etc.

   In short, everything we do is building our knowledge, which is manifested in all what we do, think, want or feel. In this sense, the knowledge could be defined as an inseparable combination of thought, emotion and action.

   All knowledge, concepts and ideas are built over other knowledge, concepts and ideas, but to get certain types of knowledge, it is required a journey because knowledge is not open to anyone, it is only open to those who want to make a conceptual journey that will lead them to be able to assimilate a new idea. Beyond the considerations of whether the knowledge has to flow or has to be stored, I think we should act and interact from knowledge.

   Knowledge, this that is so hard to define, is perhaps what best defines each one of us (is our identity?), I talk about a knowledge that has an indissoluble combination of thought, action and desire, not about a computer hard disk. We are not machines. My knowledge is how I act, how I think and how I want or feel, and also, what I do, what I think and what I want or feel.