1. What did John Rawls call the thought experiment he believed would yield fair and just principles, and what was its primary device?
2. Under what circumstances would Rawls' theory permit huge inequalities of wealth between people?
3. What was the Imitation Game, and who devised a thought experiment to oppose it?
4. What, according to Searle, is involved in truly understanding something?
5. How do some philosophers think we might use computers to achieve immortality?
6. What does Peter Singer say we should sacrifice, to help stranger
3. What was the Imitation Game, and who devised a thought experiment to oppose it?
4. What, according to Searle, is involved in truly understanding something?
5. How do some philosophers think we might use computers to achieve immortality?
6. What does Peter Singer say we should sacrifice, to help stranger
7. Why did Singer first become famous?
8. How does Singer represent the best tradition in philosophy?
WGU
1. Being grown-up is widely considered to be what? Do you agree?
2. Is Leibniz's optimism more likely to appeal to a small child? Why? 3
3. What was Kant's definition of Enlightenment? 5
4. What do Susan Neiman's children say she can't understand? Do you agree? 9
5. Why is judgement important? Is this a surprising thing to hear from a Kantian? 11
6. Being a grown-up comes to what? 12
7. What did Paul Goodman say about growing up? Are his observations are still relevant? 19
8. Why (in Neiman's opinion) should you not think this is the best time of your life, if you're a young college student? 20
9. What did Samoan children have that ours lack? 27 Can we fix that?
10. What is philosophy's greatest task? 31
WGU
ReplyDelete1. "Being grown-up is widely considered to be a matter if renouncing your hopes and dreams, accepting the limits of the reality you are given, and resigning yourself to a life that will be less adventurous, worthwhile and significant then you supposed when you began it." I agree that this is a common idea that young people are exposed to, and I believe it is partly responsible for the deep-seated frustration and lack of motivation that our generation seems to feel. It is almost as if those who are discontent with their lives delight in crushing our aspirations by giving us "real world" lectures in an attempt to make themselves feel better. This is my own personal experience, others may think differently. I, however, will continue to dream despite those who deem my goals to be "unrealistic."
2. Leibniz's optimism is more likely to appeal to a small child because of how children learn about the world. The more they learn, to a seemingly limitless extent, the more they understand. This allows a level of optimism and excitement about the world that I believe we could all benefit from.
3. Kant's definition of enlightenment was "reason's emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity."
I think there is a fine line between crushing dreams unnecessarily and being realistic. I agree with you that many institutions have begun making youth more resigned than they should be, and this does have detrimental effects on mental well-being. However, I think it is also possible for some to develop unrealistic expectations if not given other guidance, and they will essentially learn the same lesson on their own, becoming disappointed with what they failed to achieve. This is what makes the issue of growing up difficult to deal with. Don't crush their dreams now, but don't let them be disappointed because of what they thought they could achieve and didn't.
DeleteAntonella Comaschi Section 3
Delete. Is Leibniz's optimism more likely to appeal to a small child? Why?
I agree that Leibniz's optimism is more likely to appeal to children because of how they interact with the world. It would be nice to have a level of optimism. However, I don't believe we would all benefit from it because as we grow up we mature and have to learn to when not to use optimism.
Section #1
ReplyDeleteLHP
1. What did John Rawls call the thought experiment he believed would yield fair and just principles, and what was its primary device?
The original position, design a better society without knowing which position you'll occupy. I like the idea of the thought experiment but am not quite fond with Rawls' answer to it. I feel like a society built on his answer doesn't encourage advancements and progress. Sure his society might be overall better socially but what is the point of proving your capabilities if all it will do is grant you less resources. How will new inventions and discoveries be made if those that find them are punished for contributing. What will stop those capable from acting less capable to reap benefits.
3. What was the Imitation Game, and who devised a thought experiment to oppose it?
Turing devised that if a computer can fool a human into thinking it is human it is then intelligent. John Searle devised the Chinese Room thought experiment. I agree with Turing that a computer can be intelligent. While AI might have somethings it can't do now that doesn't mean it will remain that way. I remember when a majority of people thought AI wouldn't be able to make art. While you could argue it isn't art because humans have to give it an input to grant an output. There is an input that compels human artists to make their art and it usually consists of very things they have observed through senses a little akin to AI.
5. How do some philosophers think we might use computers to achieve immortality?
Transfer people's brains into computers. I don't think that will be feasibly possible anytime soon. I think copying someone's brain into a computer might, but directly from brain to computer in a constant stream of consciousness no. It is kind of difficult to think of technology or methods of deploying technology that can do that. The only thing I can think of is maybe slowly replacing someone's brain with computer and making sure computer and brain integrate with each other. I personally don't like the idea of immortality so even if the option manifests in my life time I won't be taking it if it were my choice.
Section #1
Delete(In response to question 5)
Yeah, I don't like the idea of immortality either. Not just for reasons of morality but also because that sounds dreadful. We have had so much media that portrays fictional instances of someone living forever and they always end with showing how miserable it is. Like, literally EVERY piece of media depicts that. Personally, it sounds terribly to me because I would eventually run out of things to do. That is, if I even CAN do anything if I'm uploaded to some Cloud Storage on a clunky computer. If I'm just forever-conscious in a box one day, please blow that crap up.
While the way that we intake information and create things out of it definitely is akin to AI in some ways, AI is limited in that it is *completely* depending on existing content/information and can't create new knowledge or wholly original works. In studies where AI is given a completely new puzzle or problem custom-made to test it, it always fails because it doesn't actually have the intelligence to work through the test, and the answers aren't already available. While AI has certainly been a great leap forward in the role of computers, it absolutely still has its limitations compared to humans.
DeleteThe idea of transferring our conscience to a computer just seems strange. I mean, technically, that is the best way to create a perfect artificial intelligence would be to use an actual human. Furthermore, it's kind of like the ship of Theseus thing, where if you are put into a computer, are you really still you? You are no longer human, even if you have your human mind.
DeleteThe original position, the veil of ignorance
ReplyDeleteIf one person was extremely poor and the other was much richer the example he used was a banker and a regular poor man.
3. The imitation game is a test for computer to see how smart it was by having a person technically text to it and the person would need to see if it was a person or computer. John Searle
To extend on your 3rd point, the end of the imitation game was to see if a computer could convince a human that it, the computer, was a human. If it could, that meant it was intelligent. Today, there are some things created by computers do look incredibly realistic and human.
DeleteSection #1
ReplyDeleteLHP
2. Rawl only accepted large inequalities in wealth if the poorest people benefited from it. I do agree with this (any reasonable person would). I think his world is one that everyone would like to live in, unless that person just doesn't like poor people. I'm assuming that he was speaking in hypotheticals, however, because I don't know how a world like that would be accomplished. I also don't really understand how someone being rich could lead in more support and money to a poorer person. I also don't know much about economics, so maybe it could work?
Section #1
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7. Peter Singer first became famous because of his book "Animal Liberation", which was about the treatment of animals in our society. He argued for more humane treatment of them, going as far as to say that everyone should be vegetarian to lessen the pain experienced by animals. While I agree that we should advance as a society in treating animals with more respect and care, I do not necessarily agree that everyone should go vegetarian. Not everyone responds well to a fixed diet of only plant-based foods. People who propose vegetarianism to others probably do well with the diet and assume that everyone else would benefit the same. Though they are minimizing harm, they also undervalue the nutrients that foods such as fish, eggs, and poultry give to the body. I think there is a way to still eat meat and animal products while treating them humanely.
I agree with your take on Singer's position on this issue. Vegetarianism not only neglects a large array of nutrients but also contradicts the whole idea of the food chain. It's only natural for species to feed on those below them on the food chain, and our bodies have evolved to depend on these specific sources of nutrients and energy.
DeleteMackenzie Harris, Section 2
ReplyDeleteLHP
1. The Original Position is what Rawls called his thought experiment and its primary device was choosing
without knowing your own place.
2. He thought that the rich could only get a certain amount of money as long as the poorer got more. In theory this could work, but it would never be sustainable for the environment. I think a better way for his ideas to work out is if we lived in a more communist society where everyone in the world got the same amount of money and treated fairly no matter what, but with that we would be stripped of many freedoms. In a society like he is thinking we wouldn't be able to have freedom and equalness.
3. The imitation game is giving answers that fool people on the outside into thinking you know what you are saying/doing.
6. We should put some money into Charites that actually benefit people that are not as well off as us.
7. Singer first became famous for the books he wrote on the treatment of animals.
Section 2
ReplyDelete3. What was the Imitation Game, and who devised a thought experiment to oppose it?
Alan Turing’s Imitation game, later known as the Turing Test, was a philosophical experiment and exercise designed to verify or disprove the capacity for any given computer to posses consciousness, in which a human being has a discussion with an anonymous subject that could be either human or computer, where failure to correctly identify the subject as a computer would indicate that it is, indeed, conscious.
John Searle was the philosopher responsible for attempting to refute the test with a thought experiment. The thought experiment, dubbed the Chinese Room thought experiment, posits that computers which speak cohesively enough to fool a human does not necessarily indicate that the computer has any awareness of what it is outputting.
Before going into my own interpretation of the concept, I feel the need to present my biases (the ones I’m currently aware of, at least): I am incredibly obsessed with sci-fi, robots, and artificial intelligence and have been since I can remember. It has become a much more interesting subject as of late, given the advancements in AI and the controversies and implications it is bringing with it, and I am more eager than ever to contemplate it all. Another bias, which I will descuss at more length later, is that I am atheist.
With that being said, I am inclined to side with Searle at least on a surface level. While Turing’s proposal is wonderfully simple, it is also just that; simple. Perhaps too simple. As Searle points out, the mimicking of human speech is only an output and not necessarily indicative of internal processes. In a way, it emulates David Hume’s issue with the watchmaker theological analogy; he saw the complexity of organisms as separate from the argument that they were purposefully designed (the observation could reasonably, to him at least, occur without then drawing a conclusion about a creator’s existence, let alone specifically the Christian God). This type of argument is actually a type of logical fallacy called a non-sequitur, and I see Turing’s perspective as similar. Does this mean that I doubt the ability for computers to become aware (and do I believe this has already potentially occurred)? That is a much more difficult question which takes some examination first of the definition of “consciousness”.
(Continues in replies)
Consciousness is a controversial and heavily debated term whose disunity in definition makes discussion of it almost meaningless unless an attempt is made to define it. This also means that my definition of the term may (and definitely will) not agree with other’s definitions, making it incredibly likely that my conclusions on this topic will vary drastically from that of others, even if we apply the same logic and methods.
DeleteWhy can nobody seem to agree on the properties and nature of consciousness, yet be in almost perfect agreement that it does exist in some way? It is because we are attempting to put causes and reason behind a process which we all experience the results of constantly. In fact, it IS experience, plus some. Most people, myself included, agree that humans are all conscious (with controversy around mental impairment) and (more loosely) that consciousness is attempting to define the nature of experience and reaction. That is, the perception of stimuli, the internalization of the stimuli into information, and the reaction to said information. These three qualities will be used in my definition going forward. I would imagine many might be inclined to emphasize the importance of emotion to the experience, though I would say that a human that lacks emotion would not mean they aren’t conscious, so I will omit such a qualification in my analysis.
I am an atheist and do not believe in the supernatural (with enough skepticism to acknowledge the possibility of being incorrect) and, according to my specific conception of atheism, do not believe in the existence of a soul or other, analogous immaterial source of consciousness. I think so simply because I have yet to see anything that has convinced me that the physical processes of the body cannot sustain consciousness. With this in mind, it then follows that consciousness is likely a physical system. This has a quite interesting implication: it means that conscious systems can be constructed. Whether or not it requires organic matter or a specific arrangement is not made clear, but at the very least, if you were to assemble a human being out of only atoms other humans typically are composed of, as if this person had been naturally born, they would posses consciousness.
Gathering everything said so far, my definition of consciousness is:
- A system of collecting, processing, and reacting to information based on physical structures, which could hypothetically be constructed without the need of being developed from reproduction.
This, pointedly, still fails to answer whether computers could be capable of consciousness, because it is not a complete definition. The missing components that would make this more applicable are, unfortunately, much harder to gather evidence for one way or another: we have defined the general flow of processes that could be conscious and we have defined the general physicality of it, but we have done only that. We still have no clue what specific mechanisms cause human consciousness and why, which would be crucial to answer major components of the computer consciousness problem. Such components include: does consciousness need an organic medium, or can circuits, plastic, and metal work just fine? Does it need to process, internalize, and react specifically as a human does so, or is any approach to those behaviors valid as consciousness? The latter reveals an even bigger problem: we cannot even point to a system in the human body that we KNOW causes consciousness. Even if we could, we would need to understand every component of the process and what their tasks are respectively. Beyond even any of that, a semantic problem arises if we determine all internal tasks in the process of consciousness; would a system that performs every task needed for human consciousness but which does so with different methods (ones and zeros instead of cells), would people still reject it as true consciousness because it FEELS too different?
(Continues in another reply)
Personally, making many assumptions about the unknowns posed above, I think it makes sense that a replication of the general tasks needed for consciousness would result in true consciousness, regardless of medium or method. Does Turing’s test then actually make sense (under these conditions)? This is where my surface level agreement with Searle collapses, because now it does seem that a computer which can engage in a logical conversation (that is to say, actually is consistent and sensible with its responses and not just regurgitating utter nonsense irrelevant to the human prompts) is demonstrating all three basic components of consciousness listed earlier:
Delete- It must first register (perceive) the human prompt,
- Then it must internalize the prompt (analyze it and make mental connections),
- Finally, it must output a response using the most relevant knowledge it can muster.
The interesting thing about this is, aside from labeling current LLMs conscious, it does not require, as Searle argues, an understanding of a human’s meaning of concepts to be conscious. In Searle’s argument, he considers a computer incapable of consciousness because it, like an English speaking man in his Chinese Room thought experiment, must unknowingly respond to prompts in a foreign language. I posit that yes, perhaps the man in the room and the computer do not see the intended meaning in the prompts or their own responses, but they do see their own version of meaning; the man must recognize the symbol and make the connection with his knowledge of other symbols and his guidebook to accurately respond, and an LLM must recognize the linguistic components of a prompt and compare them with its knowledge of language and how it is applied to formulate a response. Both could be blind to the meaning that they provide the prompter, but I would argue they need to at least be aware enough to understand it in their own way, no matter how abstract. That, to me, is a form of consciousness.
Emotion is an entirely different can of worms with many, MANY implications, all of which excite me greatly, but this is already a massive post and it would ultimately be tangential given my dismissal of emotion as a component earlier. (I do have reason to believe, however, that computers could also be capable of feeling emotion)
"Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility."
ReplyDeleteI find that I oftentimes don't focus on the large amounts of possibilities in the choices that I make in my day-to-day. I often either fall into routine or try to find the most efficient choices to make without taking into account the possibilities that may just change the trajectory of my life.
I agree. Even when thinking about the future, I usually only create a handful of possibilities. I think that we feel comfort when we think we know how things are going to go, so we often refuse to be open to more possibilities.
DeleteThe imitation game, or Turing test was a test created by Alan Turing that sought out to determine a machine's intelligence. it involved a questioner and two subjects. One subject was a human and the other was a machine. If the questioner could not identify which subject was the human, then the machine passed the test. John Searle proposed the Chinese Room thought experiment in opposition of the Turing Test.
ReplyDelete4. Searle believed that the ability to understand comes from the composition of a thinking mechanism rather than the way that it functions. He believed that a machine can never truly comprehend information like humans do simply because they do not have an organic mind.
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