Robot Brains

The Turing Test

Enigma Machine

I just recently saw the film "The Imitation Game," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game based on the biography of Alan Turing, "Alan Turing, The Enigma," by Andrew Hodges. The Imitation Game The film showcases the effort made by English intellectuals to crack the "enigma" code and is a worthwhile thriller touching on everything from The British war effort, to gay rights, to cognitive science. The film got me thinking about the problems of artificial intelligence, so I decided to take a look at this excellent work on the life and troubled mind of computer scientist Alan Turing.   http://www.turing.org.uk/  

The first paragraph of the introduction alone is worth the read for its mind-bending journey into the daunting questions facing cognitive science. 

I have taken a great interest in developments in artificial intelligence since writing articles on the subject based on interviews I did with cognitive scientist  and philosopher Hubert Dreyfuss of Berkeley University in California published by the Harmonist Magazine back in the 1980s.



Dreyfuss was a philosopher who had written at length on Heidegger's ideas about consciousness. Dreyfuss with friends at the time with cognitive scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT who had done on solving the so-called "Turing Test."  Dreyfuss told me two important things: One I should watch out for a new development called the "internet" which would be based on the Darpanet Defense department information interchange network.


And two: he claimed that artificial intelligence was a fraud; computers would never really think.

In the course of writing my article I researched the so-called "Turing Test." According to Alan Turing, the idea of whether or not a machine thinks may be tested by using a simple method. A person sits in a room with a typewriter and types messages. He receives messages on another typewriter. He may put any question he likes. At the end of this written conversation he may judge if his interlocutor is human or a machine. If a machine successfully convinces the human that it is capable of a rational conversation, then the "Turing test' is passed. Machines can think.

This argument was put to the test by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT.


He invented a program called ELIZA for Professor Dolittle's subject and patient in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA Eliza used nondirectional Rogerian psychotherapy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-centered_therapy in creating a so-called "conversation" with a student volunteer. The computer played "Doctor" with the student.

A typical conversation http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/eliza.html with ELIZA might go something like this:

The capitalized lines are the machine responses.

Student: Men are all alike.

ELIZA: IN WHAT WAY?

They're always bugging us about something or other.

CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?

Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

He says I'm depressed much of the time.

I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED

It's true. I am unhappy

DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY

I need some help, that much seems certain.

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP

Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.

TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY

My mother takes care of me.

WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU

My father.

YOUR FATHER

You are like my father in some ways.

WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE

You are not very aggressive but I think you don't want me to notice that.

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE

You don't argue with me.

WHY DO YOU THINK I DON'T ARGUE WITH YOU

You are afraid of me.

DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU

My father is afraid of everybody.

WHAT ELSE COMES TO YOUR MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER

Bullies.

DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE

Some students felt that ELIZA was the perfect listener and kept coming back for more therapy. The Turing test had been successfully passed.  You can read more about that here: http://computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/eliza.html

Passing the Turing Test

Of course, the mere fact that it is possible to game people with a "Turing Test' may not be solid evidence for machine thought. It really depends on how we define thought. That's where cognitive science comes in.

Alan Turing, alas, is no longer with us, having committed suicide after being sentenced to chemical castration for his alleged homosexuality. He left us with many questions.

Alan Turing: Great Mind of the 20th Century.

Alan Turing, alas, never got the credit he deserved for creating precursors of our modern thinking machines and the search engines that drive them.


But many have sought to fill his shoes, from the plodding genius of Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Creative Giant Steve Jobs at Apple to Bill Joy, chief computer scientist at sun microsystems. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

One of the great minds to contribute to the debate is Douglas Hofstadter, author of "Gödel, Escher, and Bach, and Eternal Golden Braid" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach and American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of "I", consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation and discovery in mathematics and physics. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/

As you can see from the list these mental functions represent higher order cognitive abilities, the kind that go far beyond the simple linguistic tricks demanded by a "Turing Test." Yet, Hofstadter argues that cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms and that self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of meaningless elements. He argues by using an analogy comparing the brain's neural networks to the organizations found in ant colonies.  

Here are the first few paragraphs from Hofstatder's introduction to Alan Turing: Enigma

Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops in an underlying physical substrate, such as a vast network of nerve cells? If so, could something else be substituted for the nerve cells − something such as ants, giving rise to an ant colony that thinks as a whole and has an identity − that is to say, a self? Or could something else be substituted for the tiny nerve cells, such as millions of small computational units made of arrays of transistors, giving rise to an artificial neural network with a conscious mind? Or could software simulating such richly interconnected computational units be substituted, giving rise to a conventional computer (necessarily a far faster and more capacious one than we have ever seen) endowed with a mind and a soul and free will? In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate − organic, electronic, or otherwise?

Could a machine communicate with humans on an unlimited set of topics through fluent use of a human language? Could a language-using machine give the appearance of understanding sentences and coming up with ideas while in truth being as devoid of thought and as empty inside as a nineteenth-century adding machine or a twentieth-century word processor? How might we distinguish between a genuinely conscious and intelligent mind and a cleverly constructed but hollow language-using facade? Are understanding and reasoning incompatible with a materialistic, mechanistic view of living beings?

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we − even the most creative among us − but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?

Could machines have emotions? Do our emotions and our intellects belong to separate compartments of our selves? Could machines be enchanted by ideas, by people, by other machines? Could machines be attracted to each other, fall in love? What would be the social norms for machines in love? Would there be proper and improper types of machine love affairs?

Could a machine be frustrated and suffer? Could a frustrated machine release its pent-up feelings by going outdoors and self-propelling ten miles? Could a machine learn to enjoy the sweet pain of marathon running? Could a machine with a seeming zest for life destroy itself purposefully one day, planning the entire episode so as to fool its mother machine into “thinking” (which, of course, machines cannot do, since they are mere hunks of inorganic matter) that it had perished by accident?

These are the sorts of questions that burned in the brain of Alan Mathison Turing, the great British mathematician who spearheaded the science of computation.

Now these are brilliantly thought out, carefully worded questions created by a master of cognitive science, but the simple answer to these questions is NO.

Given that consciousness is always a product of brains and that brains are merely systems of neural networks  that aggregate and conglomerate like crystals, or fractals, organize into rule-based structures and gradually develop into a self-aware identity, then consciousness is a property of matter. No evidence exists to support this view. It is promethean to think that we will breathe life into machines that will think for us and do our work. http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2015/03/simulating-the-human-brain/ 

Perhaps the best thinker on the subject of Artifical Intelligence is Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Optical Character Reader, Kurzweil Synthesizers, and much of Speech Recognition and Text to Speech technology.


His thesis is that we are nearing what he calls the "Singularity" where machines will be smarter than humans. It's fascinating reading I can assure you. Perhaps one computer by itself doesn't meet the criteria for thought, even by Alan Turing's standard. But what if you hook millions of computers together in a network like the internet. What if every six months computer speed and memory doubles. Yestderday's office computer looks like a dinosaur. Your handheld device is infinitely faster and more powerful. What will the internet look like in twenty years, doubling in intelligence, speed, and memory every six months? Have a look at Kurzweil's ideas and see if they don't seem frightening. http://www.singularity.com/

According to the ideas of singularity advanced by Kurzweil and company. Machines will become better doctors, scientists, literary translators and poets based on complex algorithms with deep structure that will understand all things human. Humans will become useless. We might as well go to the Himalayas and practice yoga.

And yet, enticing as it seems, this entire thesis is based on a fallacy. Matter creates mind. We can see the evidence for a fascinating symbiosis that occurs in the interchange between material particles as tiny as neurons and their vast network of connections in the human brain. But subtract the life element from any brain and what can the neurons do but wither and rot? Does matter really create mind? Is consciousness a function of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen; or do the matrerial elements themselves depend on the conscious element.

Are you nothing more than a skeletal bag of chemicals wrapped in skin?

This may sound metaphysical, but after hearing so much speculative science fiction from great minds like Hofstadter it may be refreshing to consider an alternative point of view; one that takes human life into consideration. Doctors understand that human metabolisms are quite distinct. One man's medicine is another man's poison.

Doctors natively understand these questions. Take a look at Dr. Deepok Chopra for example: it's easy to dismiss him because he speaks with a foreign accent. He comes from India of all places. But let's get beyond the stereotypes for a moment. India has a burgeoning high tech economy and is surprising the world with the depth of its innovation at a time when the world needs creative solutions to problems from energy alternatives to new health-care models.

India is more modern than you think.

Whenever someone speaks on these matters, the tendency is to be as secular as possible, as if to admit that we are more than just this physical material metabolism is so much silly metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. We tune people out and refuse to hear anything but our own prejudices. But take a moment and listen to an educated mind describe the nature of consciousness. Does this sound like gibberish to you? Or is the idea of robots flying airplanes, serving drinks, playing the piano, and writing poetry the real gibberish. Which do you prefer: science fiction or metaphysical reality? 

Here's Deepok Chopra writing on consciousness:

 Since consciousness is the basis of all reality, any shift in consciousness changes every aspect of our reality. Reality is created by consciousness differentiating into cognition, moods, emotions, perceptions, behaviour, speech, social interactions, environment, interaction with the forces of nature, and biology. As consciousness evolves, these different aspects of consciousness also change.

Although every spiritual tradition speaks of higher states of consciousness it is especially in Vedanta that we find such a structured map of these stages of development. The average person only experiences three states of consciousness in an entire lifetime. These are deep sleep, dreams, and waking state of consciousness. The brain functions measurably different in each of these states. Brain biology and brain waves show precise and different characteristics between sleep, dream, and waking states of consciousness.

Spiritual practice or sadhana begins the process by which an individual transforms his or her consciousness from these three common states of consciousness into “ higher states” of consciousness. Through of any of the four primary yoga practices (the yogas of being, feeling, thinking, doing) the mind is led past its conditioned states to its pure unconditioned state. 

Thanks for checking in.