🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct2.225739.4915@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>In article <26519@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:

>>Indeed, in expert systems, knowledge representation plus mechanical
>>inferencing systems are not only capable of chains of deductive
>>reasoning, and making hypotheses and testing them, but of explaining
>>what they are doing and why they are doing it in a persuasively
>>rational manner.

>If they can do this, they are conscious.

Many years ago to entertain some schoolkids I wrote a BASIC program
based on ELIZA which was capable of having apparently sensible
conversations with the user about how it worked. The point of the
exercise was to present them with something that behaved as though it
was intelligent and conscious, but which was capable of dispelling the
illusion by explaining the simple trickery involved.

I take it that you would have insisted that the program's dispelling
of the illusion was the trickery, and that I had actually succeeded in
writing a conscious computer program in 60Kbytes of BASIC?
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh          +44 (0)31 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205