Archive for May, 2009
Patricia Churchland recently gave a talk in the “Expand Your Mind: Getting a Grasp on Consciousness” conference organized by MIT. She made a very interesting point that I would like to share with my readers here. The basic question is – why don’t plants have a consciousness? We know they don’t simply because they don’t have a central nervous system like a brain that would organize stimulus and respond to it.
The crux of the issue that Ms. Churchland was making, was that all sensory perception and even consciousness itself is because we can “move from point A to point B”. Without that ability to move, there is simply no use in having a consciousness. That makes sense. If you approach to cut a plant down, the plant can’t defend itself using any thought process either deliberate or instinctive. Therefore, it would be meaningless for a plant to have pain as it would not confer any sort of survival advantage.
It’s interesting to note that sensations are only given to organisms that can move lending weight to this idea. It leads us a fairly depressing conclusion though. There is no conception of beauty or art for it’s own sake. Sensory perception and all the associated sentiment that goes with it, somewhere down the line came into existence because they helped us essentially perform better at one of the four “F” – Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting, and well, you know….Reproduction!
Somewhat depressing isn’t it?
If you’re interested in AI, you’ll be surprised how far they’ve come along till now. You can try them yourself with online chat bots. Don’t be too hard on them though – they’re good. But not that good. My favorite place to find online chat bots is http://testing.turinghub.com/. It features some of the best bots out there. I have a personal liking for Landru – the namesake from the “Star Trek” episode – Return of the Archons.
You’ll find that each chat bot has it’s own personality. For example, the one called Alice is well – bitchy almost! You’ll need to experiment with them to find out which one is your style. Just ensure you keep the conversation linear. If you talk about something and then come back to it later, the bots don’t seem to remember it and therefore reveal themselves as not human. But otherwise, they amaze you with their understanding of what you’re talking about.
In fact, in the aforementioned site, it asks if you think you were chatting with the computer or one of the site’s adminsitrators – something called the “Turing Test”. Turring suggested that the proof of real AI would be when a human was unable to identify whether he was talking to a robot or not. In recent test, chat bots were able to fool humans 30% of the time. That’s pretty good. Stay tuned. They’re getting better. And when they do, we’ll be right here to tell you abou tit.