On 21 Sep 2012, at 22:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Post from my blog:
Simple as that, really. From psychological discoveries of the
subconscious and unconscious, to cognitive bias and logical
fallacies, to quasi-religious faith in artificial intelligence, we
seem to have a mental blind spot for emotional realities.
What could be more human than making emotional mistakes or having
one’s judgment cloud over because of favoritism or prejudice? Yet
when it comes to assessing the feasibility of a sentient being
composed of programmed functions, we tend to miss entirely this
little detail: Personal preference. Opinion. Bias. It doesn’t bother
us that machines completely lack this dimension and in all cases
exhibit nothing but impersonal computation. This tends to lead the
feel-blind intellect to unknowingly bond to the computer. The
consistency of an automaton’s function is comforting to our
cognitive self, who longs to be free of emotional bias, so much so
that it is able to hide that longing from itself and project the
clean lines of perfect consequences outward onto a program.
It’s not that machines aren’t biased too - of course they are
incredibly biased toward the most literal interpretations possible,
but they are all biased in the same exact way so that is seems to us
a decent tradeoff. The rootless consciousness of the prefrontal
cortex thinks that is a small price to pay, and one which will
inevitably be mitigated with improvements in technology. In its
crossword puzzle universe of Boolean games, something like a lack of
personhood or feeling is a minor glitch, an aesthetic ‘to be
continued’ which need only be set aside for now while the more
important problems of function can be solved.
It seems that the ocean of feelings and dreams which were tapped
into by Freud, Jung, and others in the 20th century have been
entirely dismissed in favor of a more instrumental approach.
Simulation of behaviors. Turing machine emulation. This approach has
the fatal flaw of drawing the mind upside down, with intellect and
logic at the base that builds up to complex mimicry of mood and
inflection. The mind has an ego and doesn’t know it. Thinking has
promoted itself to a cause of feeling and experience rather than a
highly specialized and esoteric elaboration of personhood.
We can see this of course in developmental psychology and
anthropology. Babies don’t come out of the womb with a flashing
cursor, ready to accept programming passively. Primitive societies
don’t begin with impersonal state bureaucracies and progress to
chiefdoms. We seem to have to learn this lesson again and again that
our humanity is not a product of strategy and programming, but of
authenticity and direct participation.
When people talk about building advanced robots and computers which
will be indistinguishable from or far surpass human beings, they
always seem to project a human agenda on them. We define
intelligence outside of ourselves as that which serves a function to
us, not to the being itself. This again suggests to me the
reflective quality of the mind, of being blinded by the reflection
of our own eyes in our sunglasses. Thoughts have a hard time
assessing the feeling behind themselves, and an even harder time
admitting that it matters.
I think we see this more and more in all areas of our lives - an
overconfidence in theoretical approaches and a continuous
disconnecting with the results. We keep hoping that it will work
this time, even though we probably know that it never will. It’s as
if our collective psyche is waiting for our deluded minds to catch
up. Waiting for us to figure out that in spite of the graphs and
tests and retooling, the machine is really not working any better.
You are right. We have very often dismissed emotion, feelings and
consciousness in human.
Unfortunately, dismissing emotion feelings and consciousness in
machine, will not help.
Bruno
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