[Wittrs] Mirsky on Watson and Seale

[SWM]

--- In Wittrs at yahoogroups.com, kirby urner <wittrs at ...> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 1:17 PM, SWM <swmirsky at ...> wrote:
> 
> >> These are not especially "metaphoric" nor "anthropomorphic" uses, just
> >> more everyday operations with our tools of expression.
> >>
> >
> > No dispute about the range of uses. I will just restate here that I am using the terms as we use them with regard to ourselves, i.e., that they denote whatever it is we think we are denoting when talking about our own mental lives and the mental lives we read in others' behaviors.
> >
> 
> A problem in getting a handle on Watson's mental life is some
> empiricists may suspect a subconscious feedback loop wherein the
> desire of the experimenter to tilt the needle, as it were, actually
> gets picked up within the mechanisms and biases the results, a kind of
> "ventriloquist effect".
> 

That's true. It's a methodological problem for the testing phase.


> This is perhaps easiest to control by making sure Watson looks at
> random cards, states what he sees, and no other humans are witnesses
> at the same moment.
> 
> Of course card reading is easy and lots of machines do it, but Watson
> might go on to guess the painter or perhaps conjecture as to where the
> photograph was taken.
> 
> But is it right to call it "a conjecture" just because it might be
> wrong, or must there be some mental process?
> 

By "mental processes" do you mean thoughts or just the whirring and purring of the internal gizmos (which are better characterized, I think, as "brain" processes)? 

> In mathematics, you don't necessarily know where the conjecture came
> from, man or machine, so that means Watson might be said to conjecture
> even today.  Chess playing programs look ahead.
> 

Yes there are metaphorical uses and, as Duncan Richter used to point out, the question of secondary meanings.


> >> Words are devices, best *not* imagined pointing sticks with their
> >> "meanings" at the far end (the bewitching view).
> >>
> >
> > No reason to even point that out. No one here is doing that. I am using the two words in the way I describe above. That's the whole of it.
> >
> 
> OK.  As long as you're not imagining mental states as like fish, with
> you standing on the shore, skewering them with words like "thought"
> and "feeling".
> 
> That's a funny picture.  Some people, when they think "denote" have
> this idea that they're actually jabbing a sharp stick through an
> object.
> 
> Thanks to our philosophical training, we don't have to put up with
> that mental picture if we find it misleading in some way.
> 


Yes. Still there is something we have that is, I think, correctly characterized as a mental life and what goes on in it may be called its elements or events or processes (though these uses should not be confused with the uses we put the same words to with regard to physical phenomena that bear those tags). 


> >> In the age of "corporate persons" it's hard to have it both ways and
> >> say "IBM can't be proud of Watson because IBM has no feelings".
> >>
> >
> >
> > ?
> >
> 
> I was just imputing mental states to a subculture, which I think is
> grammatically OK (people do it a lot).
> 
> The individual human need not be considered the repository of every
> eddy in the zeitgeist.
> 
> Sometimes the picture only becomes more clear as you zoom back and see
> the group.
> 
> Individual fish do not a school make.
> 
> I heard 7% of Greeks are voting Nazi if they vote.  Is that true?
> What's the mental state there?
> 
> Can we speak of the psychology of nations and even a mental process of
> a kind?  I think we do that, and call it psycho-history (no wait,
> that's Asimov -- call it intellectual history).
> 
> I'm just thinking Watson's mental life might be more like that of a
> nation-state, wherein we're talking about shifting weights, alliances,
> majorities, genetic algorithms, agents.
> 

I would expect that a synthetic consciousness of a type like Watson would have a very different kind of mental life than we do. The issue is not whether it is the same but whether there is one at all.

> You could build the layers like you would a city, thinking in urban terms.
> 

Yes. In fact you may recall that I have often said that if Searle's Chinese Room fails a Chinese City might not and Watson is rather more like the latter than the former. 


> Before you know it, Watson is a pulsing electronic metropolis, setting
> trends in music and fashion much as London does, or Rome.
> 
> Another world capital, that Watson (renamed ZION by IBM) with new
> polling numbers always coming in from around the world for number
> crunching -- no wonder she seems to mirror our own thinking.
> 
> You can't expect Watson to develop intelligence in a vacuum, any more
> than we do.
> 

Right.

> Feedback loops must be closed.
> 
> The solo individual is insufficient for an awakening to self
> awareness.  Watson will need us to help nudge him along, if he is to
> partake of our humanity, our sentience.
> 

What's with the "he" kimosabe? Is it pejorative to call it an "it"? Would it even matter to Watson? 

> >> We give personhood to dolls, to cartoon characters.  Bugs Bunny thinks
> >> and feels.  So why not Watson?  Why not God?
> >>
> >
> >
> > Why not? But I am not proposing we use the words in a different way that is somehow special to Watson-like machines or systems. I am proposing that we use the words in relation to such things as we use the words in relation to ourselves and that, in doing so, we are speaking about a real issue, addressing a genuinely interesting question which can be answered in a scientific way.
> >
> 
> Of course you're talking about an average self.
> 
> Some selves consider themselves in conversation with other mental
> beings or will imagine different parts of their brain each having
> voices, meaning they live in a kind of dollhouse or soap opera of
> contending brain parts.
> 
> That's not average (not sure what is though -- not claiming I'm
> average myself), but it might be how we need Watson to conceive of
> himself, if he's to be at all accurate with his mental model.
> 
> We may find we need to build "hemispheres" because the need for real
> time feedback of an "other" (at least one) that's similar yet
> different and getting a lot of the same information.
> 
> Quasi-duality (asymmetric complementarity, chirality) is actually
> critical to any really interesting mental computation -- that might be
> a principle.
> 
> Watson may have the mind of a married couple, always arguing with
> himself (dialectic).
>

That would be interesting and probably more likely than genuinely split personalities in ourselves. On the other hand, Dennett's multiple drafts theory of self suggests the opposite.
 

> That sounds like a metaphor but there may be no more direct we to say
> it.  "Duality begets Self" might be the slogan ("Adam, meet Eve.  Eve,
> Adam").
> 
> >
> > Again, this does not go to the usage I was employing.
> >
> >
> >> "Think" and "feel" are not names for species of bird that we find
> >> using our introspective binoculars.  They are shuttlecocks weaving
> >> through the tapestry of our language, meshing, but not pointing.
> >>
> >
> > Same point. I've made my usage plain here.
> >
> 
> Maybe. You often seem to nod nod wink wink to yourself about what we
> all "commonly mean" by various words.  I sense some overlap in our
> respective usage patterns.
> 

Probably. We both consider ourselves in sync with Wittgenstein after all.

> >> So those weren't my two choices.
> >>
> >> > My point in the article was that they may well be nothing more than a certain kind of information processing, contra Searle, in which case, if incorporated into a Watson-type system, there would be nothing left out.
> >> >
> 
> I'm not sure at what point we'd say Watson had developed an
> earthworm's level of consciousness.  That begs the question how
> conscious is an earthworm and we don't really have ways of quantifying
> that, although with funding, we might develop in that direction.
> 
> My point being:  I consider our way of talking rather fragile and not
> easily / simply "extended" to cover machine consciousness, not without
> breakdown of the machine-biological divide more generally.
> 
> If machines become more worm like then worms will become more machine like.
> 


I agree that there is and will be problems with extending terms like "consciousness" to machines. But I think that merely reflects the fact that extending words to cover new areas and phenomena is always somewhat problematic. Still we do it all the time so it's part of the language game!


> I'm not saying that would be bad or won't happen, just that we don't
> have the means to go forward at all quickly.
> 
> Mixing cellular and electronic components in the same device seems a
> likely direction in which to continue.
> 
> What if Watson were an array of 80K rat brains that could seem to
> predict political election outcomes with significantly greater than
> chance probability?  Is this Watson "thinking about" elections?
> 
> >>
> >> Not clear what this would even mean.  I process information using
> >> these words (along with many others).  I do work in my office.  That
> >> doesn't mean these words "are" information processing.  They help with
> >> the work, as do staples and paper clips.
> >>
> >
> > It's to the question of how brains do what they do, what consciousness, the state of being conscious, amounts to.
> >
> 
> Brains seem to need community, according to Dr. John Cacioppo.
> 
> The high bandwidth connections between them suggest they're not
> designed to work by themselves, though some can if they have to, at
> least for awhile.
> 
> Watsonites should probably go with a multi-brain model and immediately
> replicate core constructs with partial mirrors (not perfect mirrors,
> which'd be redundant).
> 

As I recall Watson was built on a platform of some 90 parallel processors.


> >> I could draw the comic book version, but I don't think there's a
> >> computer scientist alive who could get the layers right.
> >>
> >
> > Maybe. On the other hand, you never know. Maybe someone will at some point and then all the debate will go away. No, wait, then we can just debate about what it means to get the layers right!
> >
> 
> Yeah, I don't think an 80K rat brained Watson that predicts elections
> and sets trends in music would satisfy the debaters.
> 
> Does it feel?  Does it think?
> 
> >
> >> If I were a Foundation, I'd be leery of funding such experiments as
> >> they could only be part of a plot to bilk me out of my money.
> >>
> >
> > Like lots of projects I expect. So what else is new?
> >
> 
> What you can get funding for are programs designed to change states of
> consciousness.
> 
> Once consciousness is in the picture, changing it or influencing it is
> what money is for, basically.
> 
> Money provides an incentive (as an eminently tradable good) to get
> people thinking and acting in such and such a way.
> 
> Inducing consciousness in an inanimate device begs the question of
> what are the criteria of success.
> 

They would be behavioral in context I'd guess, just as they are in animate devices like us!

> Clearly if Watson can pass the Turing Test we've come a long way (he can't yet).
> 

Right. The question is does he represent a step in that direction? I would say yes.


> But surely there'd be levels in between.  It can't be all or nothing.
> 
> >
> >> The projected scene is reminiscent of when spiritualists would shake
> >> down widows for research into breakthrough devices to contact the
> >> dead.  Wasn't Thomas Edison involved in that business?
> >>
> >> Kirby
> >
> > Don't know about that but certainly Chris Columbus had a hell of a time finding investors -- and he was only talking about sailing a ship to the other side of the world.
> >
> 
> His backers wanted gold and stuff, so he had to be really cruel to the
> natives if they didn't produce it in sufficient supply.
> 
> Lots of blood chilling stories about the guy, a horror movie for sure.
> 
> By today's criteria, I'm guessing he'd be considered severely
> psychotic but that's speculation.
> 
> Hard to retroactively judge by the standards of another civilization.
> 
> Kirby
> 
> 

A lot of them would qualify as "severely psychotic" I'd guess!

SWM