[Note for non-neuropsych people - "prosopagnosia" is a deficit caused by lesions (particularly on both sides) to a region of the brain called the "Fusiform Face Area"; people with it have a specific impairment to their ability to recognize faces (both familiar and unfamiliar), though their general visual skills, object recognition, voice recognition, etc., remains more-or-less intact.]

Sai Emrys / Ilya Starikov Phil 132 – Philosophy of Mind GSI: Aaron Lambert
Paper 1, Topic 3b/f (Chinese room per Systems / Impossibility replies)

John Searle proposed his “Chinese Room Argument” about 25 years ago (Searle 1980), as an attempt to argue against the “Strong AI” belief that artificial intelligences – or in general, systems other than humans – could be (at least in theory) conscious, sentient, or “intelligent”. It invokes a story of a room which to all outside tests is able to pass the Turing test, by carrying on perfectly intelligent conversation, in Chinese writing. On the inside is a man with no knowledge of Chinese, interpreting the symbols he is given by looking them up in a tome reference tables and – following its instructions – constructs a return message of equally-meaningless (to him) symbols.

This scenario invokes some obviously impossible features, the most obvious of which is the magic “book of Chinese”. This book would, obviously, need to be written by someone who knows Chinese, and indeed could be construed as nothing but a set of instructions for describing how they would reply to any given statement – including, e.g., any that would refer to their emotions, experiences of the world, preferences, etc. Thus, the room becomes equivalent to having an intermediary between the outside world and the true Chinese speaker – one that functions in a marvelously complex manner. However, while this does counter the argument, it does not support Strong AI either, as it still relies on having an authentic (human) Chinese speaker to work.

By another reply, the worker in the room is merely a component in a larger system – which, taken as a whole, does know Chinese. The immediate reply is to obviate the room itself, by having the worker simply memorize the entire book, and then claim that this also implies that there is no longer a part vs. system relationship going on. (ibid., p. 419)

However, internalization doesn’t work as described. For one, as mentioned above, the book would need to be the equivalent of an entire speaker’s knowledge-base, etc. This would mean an extremely (infinitely?) large “book” – hardly plausible for any other human to memorize. For two, this maneuver still doesn’t obviate the system – it just hides it.

The Chinese system in this internalized “Chinese room” is not “simply a part of the English subsystem” (419), but the opposite – it is the superset. The English system (as envisioned) is the part of the operator that only knows English and follows certain rules; the “part” that speaks Chinese is the totality. In fact, one could say that the operator himself is not conscious of knowing Chinese – he doesn’t, no more than his hippocampus “knows” English. As Searle says (lecture), this is a question of levels of description.

I would like to take that point one step further than Searle does, however, and claim that it applies to consciousness as well. As with neurons that are not “conscious” in the same sense that we are – though they (and the limbic system, etc) make up the totality of our structure – still manage to create consciousness as a higher-level phenomenon, so too could be described the room – internalized or not – as being made up of lower-level consciousness (the operator, his tools, and the book), to constitute a higher-level one (the room). Obviously, the operator will not be aware of this any more than the neuron.

This argument can be extended, of course. In fact, in many ways it is similar to the counterargument against the “irreducible complexity” of Creationists. Their claim – and Searle’s – is that some property arises spontaneously, whole, and special to “us” – whether that be humans or mammals in general. However, it can be broken down, and all the steps leading up to it still can be comprehended as types of consciousness – though the farther you go from the integrated whole that is ours, the stranger it seems to call it the same thing. (A direct analogy is the evolution of humans’ “camera” eyes. [Coyne, part V].)

As Block (1997) points out, there is more than one component to “consciousness” as we conventionally think of it – and these components can be experienced (if the word applies) by themselves or together. Likewise, these components too have sub-systems, such as all the varied apparatus that goes into creating a cohesive visual percept. Lesion patients (such as prospoagnostics) give us examples of people who are, in some sense, not “conscious” to the same full extent that normal people are.

These do, indeed, combine to justify Searle’s remark – “… now the mind is everywhere. What we wanted to know is what distinguishes the mind from thermostats and livers…” (420). I will agree with the first part of this; it does entail a sort of universal mentalism.

The latter part, however, is misguided – in the same way as it is misguided to ask, “What essential property distinguishes us from chimps? Dogs? Mollusks?”, and expect them to be utterly disjoint in their makeup. As I have said, the system is conscious; it’s just a somewhat different sort of consciousness than the operator’s; likewise his stomach is a different sort, and likewise his cat. They are related by a sort of ‘genetics’ of similarity – as Searle says in dozens of places, by both behavior and structure we begin to believe other entities to be conscious. Entities more distant from us in behavior and/or structure are necessarily “conscious” in more and more distance ways – from the prosopagnostic who demonstrably has a different experience of normal life, to the cat who has markedly different physiology and senses, to a mollusk that lacks most of the complicated apparatus that enables us to process complex thoughts.

Thus, I would suggest that the “other minds” problem is best accepted as inherent, and turned on its head – that we not to try to grant or deny membership into the League of Sentients, but rather to acknowledge that it is our very ability to understand that guides our intuition in this. Empathy – both by saying “this entity is similar to me” and “this entity reacts in a similar way to me” – leads us to conclude that that other entity’s experience is like ours; this is inescapable.

It provides the limit to what we are capable of making meaningful assertions about, when it comes to others’ experiences – be it that of being a cat or a bat, or anything else. Insofar as we are similar to machines, we will be able to say that their consciousness is or isn’t similar to ours; if we create something that mimics our brain and behavior neuron for neuron, we will then be forced, chauvinism aside, to give it the same “polite convention” as we give ourselves.


(Note: While I am siding with the “standard” Systems / Impossibility replies, I’m also trying to make two [to my knowledge] novel points, which are similar to that of Systems but significantly different. Call them the “Empathy Limitation” and “Reducible Complexity” replies; relatively briefly dealt with here, due to space limitations.)

References:
Jerry Coyne - “The case against intelligent design: The faith that dare not speak its name”, Edge online. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/coyne05/coyne05_index.html, accessed 9/25/05.
John Searle – “Minds, brains, and programs”, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1980) 3, pp. 417-457.
Ned Block – “On a confusion about a function of consciousness”, The Nature of Consciousness (1997), ed. Block, Flanagan, & Güzeldere, MIT Press, London.

MCB 62 – Drugs & the Brain
Ilya Starikov / Sai Emrys - 9/19/05
GSI: Chenmei Jennie Chen
Plant Ritual

1. First, just a half-entry: blueberries. I really, really, disturbingly like blueberries, and always have. Enough to eat them by the five-pound box (every few days) when they’re actually in season (which is, alas, a very short period).

My parents used to take me blueberry-picking in orchards when we lived in New York; I would go along, with a bucket to “fill”; the usual ratio was something less than a third of the blueberries I picked actually being in my bucket by the time we got out. Supposedly, one day I ate enough to make my face and hands actually turn purple; I don’t remember this, but it’s a plausible story.

One note: this only really applies to fresh blueberries. Blueberry sauces, pie fillings, jams, syrups, etc. are actually somewhat disappointing.

2. Cotton, or more accurately, cloth.

The first thing I sewed – aside from buttons and similar minor repairs – was a cloak. I wanted to have one, and they were too expensive to buy (in any semblance of quality), so I decided to make my own. I got a pattern, some yards of discount cotton, basic sewing supplies, and made it by hand. It wasn’t difficult, but did take a fair amount of time (going at an inch a minute or so). This was somewhere around 2002.

It wasn’t until a year later that I borrowed a sewing machine and went over all of my hand stitching by machine – in way less time. It pleased me, though, that my first project, and one I did entirely by hand, held up as well as it did for as long as it did. It’s this aspect of it that I consider a sort of ritual – the making of things by hand, whether it be a cloak or a dinner. Doing so by machine is similar, but not quite the same intensity; it is not as personal.

In any case, that cloak became probably my most distinctive garment; I wore it pretty regularly through both years of community college and other times. It has served also as picnic-blanket, shopping bag, and community blanket for a bunch of huddled people on a hilltop at night. I still wear it fairly often, and am extremely recognizable as a result.

I’ve since made some other semi-unique garments to fit my tastes, variously of wool, linen, and different cottons: a greatkilt (hardly a feat of sewing, that), a hakama, two kimono and a haori. (The last three form a fairly formal ensemble for Japanese clothing, though would need to be constructed a bit differently to be suitable for, say, being worn to a wedding as the groom.)

I will, no doubt, make more as time goes on.

One thing that I find interesting about clothing, or its effect, is as a costume. I do not mean here to differentiate what I wear on a regular basis – which some could consider “costume-y” in the sense of theater – but rather that everybody’s clothing can be considered one. Normally of course, one doesn’t think about it – it’s just a T-shirt and jeans after all; where’s the costume in that?

The answer only comes in comparison. It’s the ubiquity of certain costumes in our culture that makes them hard to see, or to recognize for what they are; they are all worn anyway to act a part, to affect perceptions – either one’s own (e.g. in the case of sexy underwear) or others’ (everything else).

Mine are primarily for their effect on me; they amuse me, they make me more self-aware, they are more comfortable in some ways. However, I certainly also enjoy adding a bit of creative chaos to others’ lives; there aren’t many other things one can do passively that make people you pass all day smile – or wonder, at the least.

3. In a similar vein, one day while walking I crossed through a small grove of trees that had recently been trimmed. There were some branches lying around on the ground; this reminded me of my desire to make myself a walking-staff, so I took out my Leatherman and sawed off a good piece on the spot.

It took some work – stripping the grey outer bark (with its stringy under-layer) and trimming stubs by knife, eventually (later) staining it with teak oil for strengthening, and (much later) adding some symbolic carvings with a Dremel tool – but I soon had one.

I later found out what the wood was. My biology teacher asked me, and I didn’t know; I had stripped the bark and had no other specimens, so she couldn’t identify it for certain. I returned to the grove from which I’d gotten it and found some of the same branch still there; I took another piece, and a leaf, and returned for the verdict: coast live oak.

This second, much smaller piece I made into a more seriously ritual object, an athame – a sort of dagger/sword for symbolic use in ritual. Carved by hand, then sanded (also by hand) to a very smooth finish and a slight, curved blade, the athame and staff look almost to be different woods. The staff still has its inner bark, a dark brown color, made darker still by its staining. The athame is composed of core wood – light beige – with some of the dark heartwood exposed along the blade. The hilt I left rough-cut, and inscribed the base with my name-glyph. In the course of making it, I managed to cut myself once or twice on my carving-knife, so completing the ritual part of bonding it.

I have not used it frequently, but the athame is a potent reminder when I need it. The staff is also but in a less subtle sense; it is merely an inscribed walking-stick, whereas the athame – made from the same tree-branch – is, indeed, a literally ritual use of plants, made by my hand for what is by nature and necessity a very personal use – one for which that amount of familiarity with one’s tools becomes extremely beneficial.