🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct5.190709.17067@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>In article <26534@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:

>>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?

>No.  But ELIZA does not in fact have internal representations which it
>really uses to explain what it is doing to a questioner; its
>apparently intelligent responses _are_ a trick.  The expert systems
>referred to by the original posting do, and so, in my view, they are
>conscious.

The original Weizenbaum ELIZA did have some primitive internal
representations to help it make sense, such as recently used keywords
which it could fall back on when it could make no sense of a response.

My BASIC program had more -- It kept track of such things as topics of
discussion, type of discussion, and length. It used these to do such
things as try to provoke taciturn responders, to return to good topics
when a responder seemed to be getting irritated, etc..

So I presume that you think my program was conscious?

>I think that _everything_ has "qualia", in
>Cahlmers's sense of having a "bare experiential feel".  Consciousness,
>for me, has something to do with "knowing oneself" to some extent.  I
>would recognize any system which maintains an internal model of its
>own activity and can provide answers to queries about same as
>(minimally) conscious.  Note that consciousness does not necessarily
>go with being terribly bright.

It seems that quite a small and simple device would satisfy your
criterion of consciousness. For example, would a thermostat which had
a "what state?" enquiry button and two coloured lamps with which to
reply to the query be (minimally) conscious? 

How about if we omitted the button and always made the lamps track the
internal state? Conscious?

How about if we omitted the lamps and simply took the lid off an
ordinary thermostat so that enquirers could tell the internal state by
inspection? Conscious?
-- 
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