HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rudis+@cs.cmu.edu (Rujith S DeSilva)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Date: 20 Aug 92 04:06:01 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.Bt9Kq2.CLy.1
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

In article <1992Aug19.210204.29868@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil
Rickert) writes:
>In article <Bt4xt1.MA0.1@cs.cmu.edu> rudis+@cs.cmu.edu (Rujith S DeSilva)
(that's me!) writes: 
>>(1) Does freewill arise solely through the mechanism of chaos?
>
>Usually we think of free will as the ability to make a decision, and
>have that decision affect what we do in the future.  That is, we make a
>choice, and can stick to that choice.

I prefer a more operational definition.  Let me suggest the following
different flavours of freewill.  I assume that the brain/mind/soul obeys the
`usual' physical laws.

(a) All your `decisions' can be predicted in advance, given sufficiently
advanced equipment.  In this scenario, I would say that one does not have
freewill.  Note that being able to predict some or most of your decisions is
insufficient.

(b) All your decisions can be predicted, given sufficient time on the advanced
equipment.  All of them can no longer be predicted in advance.  I'm not sure
whether this is significantly different from (a).

(c) Your decisions are pre-determined, but they are not predictable.  I think
chaos has to be invoked here.

(d) Your decisions are not pre-determined.  I think current quantum theory
(specifically, the absence of `hidden variables') allows this possibility, but
would like an expert opinion.

Have I left out any possibilities?  What do you believe is the true situation?
Personally, I don't have a clue, but I would not like it to be (a).  Actually,
(d) is not too bad.  It could be that most of our decisions are based on our
nature/nurture, with only the borderline cases being resolved randomly.

>Well, yes, your decision is determined in advance, but no, free will is not a
>sham, and life is not a charade.

In this case, as a previous poster pointed out, are we morally responsible for
our actions?  I think the concept of rehabilitation makes sense, but
punishment does not, except as a deterrent.  Actually, none of the four
flavours above supports the idea of punishment.

Rujith de Silva.
Carnegie Mellon.
From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Date: 17 Aug 92 18:46:42 GMT
	<1992Aug12.063425.13479@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
	<BILL.92Aug12122254@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
	<1992Aug13.024527.2079@news.media.mit.edu> <93829@bu.edu>
Organization: ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging, University of
	Arizona

leao@buphy0.bu.edu (Joao Leao) writes:

   > The paradigm of the Imitation Game with Male/Female only
   > makes sense in Turing's argument if one intuitively realizes 
   > that it would be DIFFICULT to be the judge on such a game
   > between humans! Contrary to 
   >
   > >bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
   >
   > > I believe that, given an hour of interrogation, I would have a
   > > better than 90% probability of distinguishing between a man and
   > > a woman.  [ . . . ]
   >
   > I sincery doubt that you would be able to do this with any
   > consistency, [ . . . ] 

For a male imitating a female, I would begin by asking for an
explanation of the system of women's clothing sizes.  (Junior, Misses,
etc.)  Then I would ask for an explanation of "her" philosophy for
using makeup.  And so on.

For a female imitating a male, I would begin by asking "him" to
describe how "he" shaves his face.  Then I would ask "him" to describe
the sensations he experiences during orgasm.  And so on.

I sincerely doubt that many people could plausibly fake answers to
these kinds of questions for an hour.

I've seriously thought about setting up a real Male/Female imitation
game -- for its relevance to the psychology of gender, not for its
relevance to AI.  It would be as interesting to see the kinds of
questions the judges would ask as to see the answers the competitors
would give.  As I said, it wouldn't be very difficult: all you'd need
is a couple of terminals and a plentiful supply of tame
undergraduates.  The only problem would be with human subjects issues,
because the questioning would be very likely to turn sexual, and you'd
have to take precautions to keep anybody from getting traumatized.
It's actually not so easy to see how to do it without unduly
restricting the allowable lines of questioning.

   > Incidentally, the Loebner Prize competition -- which was readily  
   > dismissed by the purists in this group -- showed already some of
   > the features anticipated by Turing, specially in its surprising
   > results (considering the low expectations of the organizers)! 
   > By the way I have the transcripts of the dialogues and
   > would venture to make them ftp-able if people are interested!
   > Speak up...

I for one am interested.

	-- Bill
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com (Mark Shanks)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems 
Organization: Honeywell Air Transport Systems Division
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 92 19:21:27 GMT

In article <1992Aug19.144240.8058@syscon.rn.com> don@syscon.rn.com (Don McLane) writes:

>I was just thinking about this, so here's my speculation: I think the
>feeling of freewill may arise from our disconnectedness with the
>past.  The past doesn't seem to determine us; we feel like
>autonomous agents.  But, if the world is chaotic, our present
>mental state is the result of uncountable insignificant details.
>We can't trace the causal chain backwards, so we feel free.
>
>So, I say yes, the feeling (illusion?) of freewill arises solely
>through the mechanism of chaos.

Ah, a behaviorist. Would it follow that the degree of "disconnectedness"
experienced by an individual would have some bearing on the degree of
illusion of freewill? Would an existentialist be more disconnected than
Skinner? Would children have greater free will than adults because of
less (a smaller amount of) chaotic accretion?

Without getting into a behaviorist/free will discussion, I don't see any
reason to invoke chaos as an influence on the perception of free will, unless
it would be to discuss random neural firings or variances in stimulation
levels of assorted postsynaptic receptors. I'm sure that many readers here
would offer arguements on chaos implications for psychology, world history,
and economics, but in these instances, (IMHO), it's stretching.

Mark Shanks
shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com
From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Date: 13 Aug 92 20:07:25 GMT
	<1992Aug12.063425.13479@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
	<BILL.92Aug12122254@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
	<1992Aug13.024527.2079@news.media.mit.edu>
Organization: ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging, University of
	Arizona

minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:

   > Turing DID realize what he was saying, but most people seemed to
   > have missed his point.

Well, in spite of all the interest the Turing Test has drawn over the
years, nobody has ever (to my knowledge) actually carried out the
man-woman imitation test, even though it would be pretty easy to do.
On the other hand, a man-machine imitation test *has* been carried
out.  Do you want to say that it's impossible to interpret the results
of the man-machine test in the absence of data from a man-woman test?
I just don't believe that this is what Turing meant.

   > By the way, this group was productive until it caught this
   > disease of trying to define intelligence.  Turing wrote his paper
   > precisely because he considered this an unproductive activity.

Anybody working in Artificial Intelligence must have at least an
implicit notion of what intelligence is.  Otherwise I could build a
screwdriver, and say look, I've achieved artificial intelligence! --
and there would be no grounds for complaint.

Making these implicit notions explicit is a large part of what
philosophy is about.  It's a dangerous job -- a bad definition can
lead into nasty tangles of paradox -- but the alternative -- working
entirely with unanalyzed notions -- is even worse. 

	-- Bill
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 18:30:52 GMT

In article <Bt9Kq2.CLy.1@cs.cmu.edu> rudis+@cs.cmu.edu (Rujith S DeSilva) writes:
>I prefer a more operational definition.  Let me suggest the following
>different flavours of freewill.  I assume that the brain/mind/soul obeys the
>`usual' physical laws.

>(a) All your `decisions' can be predicted in advance ...
>(b) All your decisions can be predicted .. [but not in advance]
>(c) Your decisions are pre-determined, but they are not predictable. ...

>(d) Your decisions are not pre-determined.  I think current quantum theory
>(specifically, the absence of `hidden variables') allows this possibility, but
>would like an expert opinion.
>
>Have I left out any possibilities?  What do you believe is the true situation?
>Personally, I don't have a clue, but I would not like it to be (a).  Actually,
>(d) is not too bad.

From the point of view of a philosophical discussion, your (a), (b),
(c) seem essentially equivalent.  They all specify determinism, and only
differ on the computational feasibility of computing future behavior.

The argument I gave in <1992Aug19.210204.29868@mp.cs.niu.edu> shows that
determinism allow "free will" as a reasonable interpretation.  Presumably
you want something more absolute than a reasonable interpretation.  I
doubt that you will achieve it.  There is no support for free will in
quantum randomness.  If your behavior depends significantly on randomness,
then you have no free will.  Random behavior is certainly not my idea
of the exercise of free will.

>                     It could be that most of our decisions are based on our
>nature/nurture, with only the borderline cases being resolved randomly.

I have no problem with this.  This is consistent with my argument.
Those decisions for which I have a reason are made deterministically,
with dependence on the physical content of my brain that gives me those
reasons.  Those decisions for which I have no reason, I consciously
think of deciding randomly (although I might use the term arbitrarily),
so this is quite consistent with some random natural background information
being involved.  I really don't see that it make any great difference
whether the random information is "truly random" or is just pseudo-random
but in theory predictable.

>In this case, as a previous poster pointed out, are we morally responsible for
>our actions?

I prefer to look at moral responsibility from a pragmatic viewpoint.
Moral responsibility is an assumption of our culture, and of most
individuals in our culture.  It is written in many books (and Usenet
news articles).  As such, the assumption of moral responsibility becomes
part of the determining information that determines future behavior.
To put it bluntly, if you could wave a magic wand, and expunge all traces
of the doctrine of moral responsibility, you would change all future
human behavior, and you would probably have thereby expunged civilization
in that same act of magic.

Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 23:02:20 GMT

In article <BILL.92Aug13130725@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>
>Anybody working in Artificial Intelligence must have at least an
>implicit notion of what intelligence is.  Otherwise I could build a
>screwdriver, and say look, I've achieved artificial intelligence! --
>and there would be no grounds for complaint.
>
>Making these implicit notions explicit is a large part of what
>philosophy is about.  It's a dangerous job -- a bad definition can
>lead into nasty tangles of paradox -- but the alternative -- working
>entirely with unanalyzed notions -- is even worse. 

Well, yes.  It seems to me that we use the word "intelligence" in
regard to mental performances that we admire.  So in my view, one
wants to analyse situations of the form "A says that what B did was
intelligent," in an *approving* sense, usually -- and this means that
the "definition" is relative to someone's values and goals.  Also, if
I know a lot about how you solved a problem, then I regard it as more
a "skill" than as an intelligent performance.  

What I considered to be wasteful of time were the various lists, over
the past month or so, of criteria for defining intelligence as a
thing, rather than as a relationship.  This leads people to worry
about whether rocks or plants are intelligent, and similar silly
things.  (There are better things to wonder about rocks and plants.)

AS for philosophy, I wish I could agree with Skaggs but, for the past
century, it seems to me, the methods of philosophy have lagged too far
behind those of psychology and (more recently) of AI to be taken
seriously.  Except for Dennett and maybe a couple of other
professionals.  As Bill Skaggs says, .."It's a dangerous job.  And
what has happened, so far as I can see, is that almost all recent
philosophers have in fact assumed bad definitions, and led themselves
and their students into nasty tangles of paradox.

BTW, there were some participants who were advocating the relativistic
From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Freewill
Date: 20 Aug 92 00:03:09 GMT
Organization: ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging, University of
	Arizona

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

   > Here is one way of looking at free will.
   >
   > [ . . . ]

Very reasonable, I think.  I'd just like to add that there's a book by
Daniel Dennett called "Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth
wanting", that discusses these issues thoroughly, readably, and, to me
at least, convincingly.

Anyway, the crucial point -- which just about every important
philosopher (from Aristotle to Rickert) agrees on -- is that the
question of freedom is not *whether* actions are determined, but *how*
they are determined.

	-- Bill
From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Date: 13 Aug 92 11:34:33 GMT


>> From:    moravec@Think.COM (Hans Moravec)
>> Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
>> 
>> In article <2838@ucl-cs.uucp>, G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly) writes:
>> |> > Eliza never passed the Turing Test.  Never, never, never, never, never.
>> 
>> |> It did, with Feigenbaum's secreatry. She ask Feigenbaum to leave the room.
>> 
>> One might imagine a test to distinguish stories about conversations with 
>> Weizenbaum's secretary, and conversations with Feigenbaum's secretary.
>> 
>> Maybe something keyed on Bostonisms vs. Californiaspeak.

OOPS++! My mistake. Still, ``she'' was fooled for some of the time...
that seems to me to be the essence of the TT. OK, so she was taking
part in the experiment with knowing the "rules of the game", but are
not pyshcology experiments designed in just that way?

She was the subject of the experiment, not the box of tricks.

Gordon.

____

Gordon Joly      Phone  +44 71 387 7050 ext 3703      FAX  +44 71 387 1397
Internet: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk        UUCP: ...!{uunet,uknet}!ucl-cs!G.Joly
Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT
From: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Harry Erwin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Turing Test Myths
Date: 14 Aug 92 15:38:41 GMT
Organization: TRW Systems Division, Fairfax VA

I suspect we can change context on this question by looking at HDP
systems. Action networks are not intelligent. Recordings of plans that can
drive action networks are not intelligent. Intelligence resides in the
adaptive critic, particularly when it creates a plan for the first time
or when it adapts (tunes) an existing plan for a new situation.

I also suspect the creation of a plan is no big deal, involving a chaotic
process. The big deal is in recognizing that a given plan might be
effective or that an existing plan could be modified to be effective.

Bill McKellan's evidence that cultural innovation is similar to individual
innovation is of some value here, because it allows us to think about
individual intelligence by examining social group intelligence. (Social
groups store plans in somewhat the same way that the cerebellum does.) Ask
yourself: "When does a social group seem intelligent?"

Enjoy,
-- 
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com

Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: don@syscon.rn.com (Don McLane)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems 
Organization: Syscon Corporate Headquarters - South Bend, IN USA
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 15:24:33 GMT

shanks@saifr00.cfsat.honeywell.com (Mark Shanks) writes:

>In article <1992Aug19.144240.8058@syscon.rn.com> don@syscon.rn.com (Don McLane) writes:

>>I think the
>>feeling of freewill may arise from our disconnectedness with the
>>past.  The past doesn't seem to determine us; we feel like
>>autonomous agents.  But, if the world is chaotic, our present
>>mental state is the result of uncountable insignificant details.
>>We can't trace the causal chain backwards, so we feel free.

>Ah, a behaviorist. Would it follow that the degree of "disconnectedness"
>experienced by an individual would have some bearing on the degree of
 ^^^^^^^^^^^
>illusion of freewill? Would an existentialist be more disconnected than
>Skinner? Would children have greater free will than adults because of
>less (a smaller amount of) chaotic accretion?

No, that's not what I meant. Freewill was a feeling, but disconnectedness
wasn't.  O.K., I see that it's not obvious, and I shouldn't go around
making up words like that and expect people to understand what I mean.
"Disconnectness" meant the lack of a knowable causable connection. In
a chaotic system the complexity is so high that it is computationally
intractable to calculate system behavior for very long.  Extending this
to the mind, I'm claiming we can't know how we arrived at a given
mental state.  But people had an intuition of this even before they
developed chaos theory (and quantum mechanics), and they called the
feeling freewill.

I think this addresses your objection; let me know if not.

Don McLane
don@syscon.rn.com
From: ps@cs.strath.ac.uk (Paul Shaw)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Defining intelligence
Date: 12 Aug 92 12:05:15 GMT
Organization: Comp. Sci. Dept., Strathclyde Univ., Glasgow, Scotland.

In article <BILL.92Aug11130136@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>
>But . . .
>
>   >   > That is, [something is more intelligent than me if] it does
>   >   > things the way I would if I'd had more time to think about
>   >   > them, or that I would do given its example. 
>
>How about the following:  Adolph Hitler was pretty intelligent, I
>think, maybe more intelligent than me, but I hope that I would never
>do things the way he did, regardless of how much time I had to think
>about them.  (If Hitler seems like a dubious example, substitute
>Satan.)
>
>Even better, consider Isaac Newton, who was, no question, far more
>intelligent than me, yet devoted a major part of his life to what I
>think of as theological nonsense.
>
>	-- Bill

You've got the logic wrong here, the assertion was NOT:


That is, [something is more intelligent than me if and only if] it does
                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
things the way I would if I'd had more time to think about
them, or that I would do given its example. 


It said nothing of people who act the way you would NOT wish to.
So, [the original statement said] if someone acts the way you do not wish
to, you can conclude nothing.  If they act the way you wish to act,
you can conclude higher intelligence than yourself.


Paul.
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: cpshelle@logos.uwaterloo.ca (cameron shelley)
Subject: Re: what is consciousness for?
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 12:51:05 GMT

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
> >                                                         Cultural
> >learning, on the other hand, has to be rapid, given the short lifespan
> >of each individual who must learn it to transmit it.  As you remark,
> >consciousness would be an advantage in this system if it sped up the
> >acquisition of learned behaviour. 
> 
> I guess we have different concepts of "rapid learning".  Learning over
> a lifetime seems anything but rapid.  Most learning of culture is quite
> slow.  Dealing with crisis and emergency situations, on the other hand,
> requires rapid learning.

That's true, but also an extreme case, if I understand your meaning. 
I think learning over a lifetime is quite rapid when compared with the
general rate of genetic `learning'.  And if you subscribe to the
neotony theory of human evolution (which holds that humans are
somewhat like immature apes---apparently not an uncommon genetic
change), then our prolonged childhoods exist specifically to extend
our period of rapid learning from a couple of years to around fifteen. 
Given the amount of information young humans are expected to acquire,
even that amount of time seems small. 

</dev/cam
--
      Cameron Shelley        |"In the beginning, there was nothing.  Then
cpshelle@jeeves.uwaterloo.ca | God said `Let there be light', and there
    Davis Centre Rm 2136     | was still nothing, but youse could see it."
 Phone (519) 885-1211 x3390  | --Dave Thomas, SCTV:_Sunrise Semester_
From: stgprao@xing.unocal.com (Richard Ottolini)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: what is consciousness for?
Date: 18 Aug 92 21:37:12 GMT
Organization: Unocal Corporation
Originator: stgprao@xing

Both culture and conciousness could be considered "time sense" some conception
of a past and future.  Creatures with weak minds don't dwell on the past or
future like humans, even though they may have some memories and some capacity
to plan.  Human minds have the power of subjunction- to bring up old memories
into the mind, hold them there, analyze them, modify them.  I consider much
of planning for the future and imagination to be creative remembering, that is
rearranging pieces of memory in new ways.
Culture is societal "time sense"- memories of the past, whether history or
folklore- and directions for the future.
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Communication and Intelligence
From: Dave Sainty <terros@sideways.welly.gen.nz>
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 92 00:55:28 +1200
Organization: Sideways Bulletin Board, Lower Hutt, New Zealand

bfish@sequent.com (Brett Fishburne) writes:

> ANALYSIS:  There are children who are born without the capability to
> experience certain forms of communication (e.g. deaf).  Despite that, these
> children appear to develop at the same rate as their peers.  In fact,
> detection of deafness is particularly difficult in young children and both
> casual and experienced observers have been surprised to learn of the deafness
> In keeping with the thesis we would expect to see corresponding deficits in
> intelligence, which have not been discovered.

I would suggest that the use of a private language is an important component
of human cognition. With that in mind, I'd be rather curious as to whether
deaf people use a private language, and what form that language takes.