SEX AND EMBODIMENT, meeting 1 (out of 3)

[slight change of plans — Harry late]

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Alan Mathison Turing)

Can machines think?

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Can machines think?

Consider first the more accurate form of the question.

so, so you think you can tell...

the Turing Test

the Imitation Game (AMT)

The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex*. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus: C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair? Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be: "My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long."
* why sex???

the Imitation Game (AMT)

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as "I am the woman, don't listen to him!" to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks.

We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

Turing's prediction

"I believe that in about fifty years' time [i.e., in 2000 AD] it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.

The original question, `Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

objections

  1. The Theological Objection

  2. The "Heads in the Sand" Objection

  3. The Mathematical Objection

  4. The Argument from Consciousness

  5. Arguments from Various Disabilities

  6. Lady Lovelace's Objection

  7. Argument from Continuity in the Nervous System

  8. The Argument from Informality of Behaviour

  9. The Argument from Extrasensory Perception

the Loebner test

subcognitive profiling

subcognitive profiling (R. French)

on a scale of 0 (completely implausible) to 10 (completely plausible):

down with anthropocentrism

what if they don't have a face?



John W. Campbell, Jr., the founding editor of Astounding Stories, a classic in the field of science fiction (subsequently called Analog) used to urge writers to describe something that "thinks as well as a human, but not like a human" (see this editorial by Campbell: What do you mean... human?.

ok, so there ARE others

what now?

slide 14

Closer (Greg Egan)

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

("Intimacy," I once told Sian, after we'd made love, "is the only cure for solipsism." She laughed and said, "Don't get too ambitious, Michael. So far, it hasn't even cured me of masturbation.")

True solipsism, though, was never my problem. From the very first time I considered the question, I accepted that there could be no way of proving the reality of an external world, let alone the existence of other minds - but I also accepted that taking both on faith was the only practical way of dealing with everyday life.

The question which obsessed me was this: Assuming that other people existed, how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience being? Could I ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another person - any more than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect?

Harry?

No literature, no poetry, no drama, however personally resonant I found it, could ever quite convince me that I'd glimpsed the author's soul. Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment, grief - all were defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and observable actions.

When an image or metaphor rang true for me, it proved only that I shared with the author a set of definitions, a culturally sanctioned list of word associations.

[embodiment? Galatea 2.2?]

the jewel in the lotus

Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when, at the age of eighteen, the time came for me to "switch."

My organic brain was removed and discarded, and control of my body handed over to my "jewel" - the Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons.

chemistry?

[...] However, when I approached her the next day, she made it clear that she felt nothing for me; the chemistry I'd imagined "between us" had all been in my head. I was dismayed, but not surprised. Work didn't bring us together again, but I called her occasionally, and six weeks later my persistence was rewarded. I took her to a performance of Waiting for Godot by augmented parrots, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I didn't see her again for more than a month.

the enigma

She was impatient, aggressive, roughly affectionate.

And I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside her head.

For a start, I rarely had any idea what she was thinking - in the sense of knowing how she would have replied if asked, out of the blue, to describe her thoughts at the moment before they were interrupted by the question. On a longer time scale, I had no feeling for her motivation, her image of herself, her concept of who she was and what she did and why. Even in the laughably crude sense that a novelist pretends to "explain" a character, I could not have explained Sian.

closer

When the technology became available...

First, we exchanged bodies. I discovered what it was like to have breasts and a vagina - what it was like for me, that is, not what it had been like for Sian. True, we stayed swapped long enough for the shock, and even the novelty, to wear off, but I never felt that I'd gained much insight into her experience of the body she'd been born with. My jewel was modified only as much as was necessary to allow me to control this unfamiliar machine, which was scarcely more than would have been required to work another male body.

slide 8

closer

As for sex, the pleasure of intercourse still felt very much the same - which was hardly surprising, since nerves from the vagina and clitoris were simply wired into my jewel as if they'd come from my penis. Even being penetrated made less difference than I'd expected; unless I made a special effort to remain aware of our respective geometries, I found it hard to care who was doing what to whom. Orgasms were better though, I had to admit.

After three months, Sian had had enough. "I never realised how clumsy you were," she said. "Or that ejaculation was so dull."

closer

Next, she had a clone of herself made, so we could both be women.

closer

The day after we returned to the way we'd begun (well, almost - in fact, we put our decrepit, twenty-six-year-old bodies in storage, and took up residence in our healthier Extras), I saw a story from Europe on an option we hadn't yet tried, tipped to become all the rage: hermaphroditic identical twins.

I took a copy of the file home to Sian. She watched it thoughtfully, then said, "Slugs are hermaphrodites, aren't they? They hang in mid-air together on a thread of slime. I'm sure there's even something in Shakespeare, remarking on the glorious spectacle of copulating slugs. Imagine it: you and me, making slug love."

I fell on the floor, laughing.

I stopped, suddenly. "Where, in Shakespeare? I didn't think you'd even read Shakespeare."

closer

something slightly more up-market than an insight into the sex lives of slugs...
eight hours with identical minds.

closer

something slightly more up-market than an insight into the sex lives of slugs...
eight hours with identical minds.

[memory distinct from personality ???]

closest

closest

So, how did I experience consciousness? The same way as Michael? The same way as Sian? So far as I could tell, I'd undergone no fundamental change — but even as I reached that conclusion, I began to wonder if I was in any position to judge.

Did memories of being Michael, and memories of being Sian, contain so much more than the two of them could have put into words and exchanged verbally? Did I really know anything about the nature of their existence, or was my head just full of second-hand description — intimate, and detailed, but ultimately as opaque as language?

If my mind were radically different, would that difference be something I could even perceive — or would all my memories, in the act of remembering, simply be recast into terms that seemed familiar?

The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world. Its very existence also had to be taken on faith — and, granted existence, it too could be misleading.

closest

It was a very peculiar reminiscence. Almost everything seemed at once vaguely surprising and utterly familiar — like an extended attack of déjà vu. It's not that they'd often set out deliberately to deceive each other about anything substantial, but all the tiny white lies, all the concealed trivial resentments, all the necessary, laudable, essential, loving deceptions, that had kept them together in spite of their differences, filled my head with a strange haze of confusion and disillusionment.

FARTHER

We tried to stay together.

We lasted a week.

Bentley had made - as the law required - snapshots of our jewels prior to the experiment. We could have gone back to them - and then had him explain to us why - but self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in time.

We knew each other too well, that's all. Detail after tiny fucking microscopic detail. It wasn't that the truth hurt; it didn't, any longer. It numbed us. [...] Our surfaces had been stripped away, but not to reveal a glimpse of the soul. All we could see beneath the skin were the cogs, spinning.

the old Ndoli joke

And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.

I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise origins I didn't much want to think about . . . but then, I'd always known she had the stronger personality, I should have guessed that something would rub off).

Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part.

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

supplementary material