X-Message-Number: 12691 Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 17:14:54 -0500 From: Daniel Crevier <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #12667 - #12675 References: <> To Thomas Donaldson, who asked: > So just what is the relation between AI and consciousness? Or AI and > feeling, for that matter? I guess the relationship is that feelings and sensations can be viewed as cognitive mechanisms. As Marvin Minsky once put it to me: "Pain is what pushes the 'down' button of your goal elevator!" More generally, feelings and sensations are drives that force us, and animals, to orient our behavior in order to enhance survival. For this reason I beg to differ when you > see no reason why we could not make a machine which > by all OBJECTIVE tests would be very intelligent ie. pass all our > IQ tests, but remain quite unconscious and without either feeling or > goals. One reason why we can't has to do with task control: you can't do anything that passes for intelligent unless it's part of an organized strategy aimed at satisfying some complexly structured *goal*. For example a machine trying to pass the Turing test would have as a primary goal that of masquerading as a human, which entails supplying a believable answer to the last question asked, which requires in turn many things, such as grammatical and semantic analysis of the question, relating the concepts involved to the machine's knowledge of the world and people, and so on. Each one of these subtasks would become a goal in itself. So the machine would need goals. What about feelings? Well, if the ma- chine is driven to achieve its goals, and they wouldn't be goals unless it were so driven, then this "drive" can provide the basis for feelings. Happiness is when you meet all your goals, and unhappiness is when you don't meet any. The more complex the goal structure, the more intricate and possibly conflicting would the feelings be. Indeed, for the machine above, meeting all of the goals I've listed may conflict with the goal to come up with an answer fast enough. In a crunch, the machine may reluctantly sacrifice answer quality in favor of time. This unease may be characterized as 'anxiety'. Daniel Crevier Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12691