With the Turing test, the question is whether an AI entity that behaves entirely conscious is actually conscious. It is indisputable that consciousness exists, considering I know myself to be conscious. I cannot know, however, whether anything else is conscious, but I assume there are other conscious entities based upon their behavior. So, if you had a computer that acted entirely conscious, I would not know if it were amazing mimicry or whether it was actual consciousness. The key here though is that what I'm trying to decipher with the Turing test is whether a particular entity is conscious just like I know myself to be. I don't doubt my own consciousness, just the consciousness of others..

Moving to free will. If we see a computer that appears to act freely (just like people do), we might conclude that it too must be free because its behavior looks to be free, but that entirely begs the question. The question being begged is "Does free will exist?" That is, how can we say that the computer is free because it looks free like us when we're not even sure we're free? Unlike consciousness, where we know we're personally conscious and we don't ask "Does consciousness exist," we don't know if we're free and we do ask "does free will exist?". The best we can say is that the computer looks to be free like us, but we're not even sure we're free.

However that may not matter because we structure our lives as if free will exists. — TheMadFool

In support of that particular passage only:

“....I adopt this method of assuming freedom merely as an idea which rational beings suppose in their actions, in order to avoid the necessity of proving it in its theoretical aspect also. The former is sufficient for my purpose; for even though the speculative proof should not be made out, yet a being that cannot act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here from the onus which presses on the theory....

....We have finally reduced the definite conception of morality to the idea of freedom. This latter, however, we could not prove to be actually a property of ourselves or of human nature; only we saw that it must be presupposed if we would conceive a being as rational and conscious of its causality in respect of its actions, i.e., as endowed with a will; and so we find that on just the same grounds we must ascribe to every being endowed with reason and will this attribute of determining itself to action under the idea of its freedom....”
(Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785)

And I'll wager your author in a sentence or two tells us what a free will is. (If not an onerous task, could you reproduce that here?)

My understanding of Kant's free will is that a free will is free to act in accordance with the dictates of reason as duty. If reason instructs, then I ought to heed and do. If I cannot, then to that degree I am not free.

As so little is understood about consciousness and yet we know how computers work, it's no wonder that we have the Turing Test as a test of intelligent behaviour.

The simple fact is that humans can easily notice from simple interaction things like sarcasm, jokes or hostility or a multitude of different attitudes beneath the simple discussion. As computers (Turing Machines) simply follow algorithms and are totally unable to do anything else than that, the demands simply grow exponentially on what the algorithms have to perform. Imagine how a discussion changes instantly if someone cracks a hilarious joke. How sophisticated the algorithm (program) has to be understand that the text has a joke and it is indeed funny?

And the basic problem is that any computer or Turing Machine simply cannot perform the task "do something else than what is given in your program in a way not defined in the program".

Hey......

First....the phrase “free will” is a mischaracterization of a distinctly human condition. We don’t have “free will”; we have a will that determines its volitions without encumbrance, that is, autonomously, and at the same time obligates itself to those volitions, which we call duty.
Second....The “free” used to describe the will is just a contraction of the idea “freedom”, a pure concept of reason, which makes autonomy possible, and as such does not belong to the will as a description of it, but as a condition necessary for it.
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Your “Free to act in accordance with the dictates of reason as duty” is close enough to:
“....Everything in nature works according to laws. Rational beings alone have the faculty of acting according to the conception of laws, that is according to principles, i.e., have a will. Since the deduction of actions from principles requires reason, the will is nothing but practical reason....”
——————

If reason instructs, then I ought to heed and do. If I cannot, then to that degree I am not free. — tim wood

If you cannot do as reason instructs due to some physical obstruction or incapacity, that is a different kind of freedom than the kind that facilitates such instruction. If you cannot do as reason instructs because you have attained to a conflicting moral judgement, the will is freely exercised in so doing. You are every bit as unencumbered to be immoral as much as you are to be moral, even if the consequences of the former may be somewhat less satisfactory than the latter.

There is no 'character creation screen', my baby was determined by my Father and Mother.

I do not have free will being here, however, here, I do have an amount of free will.

Moving to free will. If we see a computer that appears to act freely (just like people do), we might conclude that it too must be free because its behavior looks to be free, but that entirely begs the question. The question being begged is "Does free will exist?" That is, how can we say that the computer is free because it looks free like us when we're not even sure we're free? — Hanover

Please refer to the what I underlined because it means illusionary/simulated free will = real free will. We're not sure because we can't distinguish the real from the illusion, the original from the copy.

And the basic problem is that any computer or Turing Machine simply cannot perform the task "do something else than what is given in your program in a way not defined in the program". — ssu

Does anything do other than what has been programmed into it?

:ok:

yet a being that cannot act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here from the onus which presses on the theory. — Mww

If you cannot do as reason instructs because you have attained to a conflicting moral judgement, — Mww

But if this situation, as you say, attained, then Kant would say you have to reason more better, yes? What, in your thinking, is the motor of morality (apparently not reason)? It seems it must be desire of some kind; that is, not-reason. Do you differ from Kant in these matters?

There are two ways to interpret the Turing test, namely the realist/cartesian interpretation and the anti-realist/non-cartesian interpretation.

The public usually understands the Turing test epistemically according to the realist interpretation, since they normally by cultural default understand consciousness in a cartesian fashion as referring to intrinsic functional semantics of the brain. They consequently view the Turing test as a fallible appearance test of a machine's internal functional properties, properties that exist independently of appearances to the contrary, say if the Turing test gave a false-negative.

The less popular alternative view, that appeared to be the view of Wittgenstein, is the anti-realist, non-cartesian interpretation of the Turing Test, whereby it is understood that if a machine passes our consciousness test, then the machine is conscious by definition. In other words, a Turing test isn't so much a test for Turing-test independent consciousness, rather the Turing test articulates the visible circumstances in which we say that a thing is conscious or not conscious.

The critical ontological difference of this latter view, is that the functional semantics of a brain or machine are understood holistically as being irreducible to the brain or machine in and of themselves. As Wittgenstein hinted in PI, A game of chess is only recognized as a game of chess when embedded within a relevant culture. Therefore Wittgenstein would likely have sided with Searle and rejected Dennett's "China Brain"; for while the population of china might be able to use semaphore to simulate the brain's internal organisation, the surrounding context isn't present to attribute intentionality.


As for the question you actually asked, i believe the notion of free-will is to a large extent orthogonal to understandings of the Turing test.

Kant would say you have to reason more better, yes? — tim wood

You said you cannot do as reason instructs, which implies a disability. Given that reason will not instruct the impossible as a moral judgement, and given that reason will not instruct beyond physical capacity, there should be no rational argument to support why you cannot do as reason instructs. Thus, Kant would say you have been morally corrupted by succumbing to a merely arbitrary empirical good, an inclination, rather than standing with the pure moral good of its practical instruction, at the sacrifice of your moral constitution. In short, you have chosen to act immorally, so, yes......you should have reasoned mo’ better.
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motor of morality (apparently not reason)? — tim wood

Feelings, or desires, cannot be the motor.....the ground, the primary condition......of morality, because it is entirely feasible to feel bad upon doing the good act. It helps us to recognize a good act by the good feeling we get from its accomplishment, but we stand in danger of not doing the good act if we fear the bad feeling we might get from its accomplishment. That which either supports or detracts from a pure moral action, and the effects of which we cannot know until after the act is done, cannot serve as ground for it, because morality is always determined before its volitions are manifest in the world.

Such is the foundation of the deontological moral doctrine, in which respect for law in and of itself, regardless of the content of any law in particular, grounds moral dispositions. Herein we may disregard our feelings when it becomes possible we won’t like them, because we have acted out of respect for law, which inspires no feelings at all except having done right. In this respect, it is not reason that is the motor, but it is practical reason that says what form the law will assume, the categorical imperative, for which thereafter our actions respect.

As for the “motor of morality”, meaning that which drives the fundamental human condition, I think Kant would go with the transcendental conception of “freedom”, transcendental in order to distinguish from the conception of freedom associated with degrees of various and sundry empirical restrictions, but rather to denote and prescribe an unconditioned a priori causal principle, that is not itself an effect of any antecedent principle. Hence, moral reasoning is practical, for the determination of its laws, but at the same time absolutely pure, because of its transcendentalism, its source being pure thought alone, having no empirical predicates whatsoever.

What say you?

Does anything do other than what has been programmed into it? — TheMadFool

Make this thought experiment:

1) Some professional team of psychologists etc. observe your doings for a while and they are able to make a quite clear and totally realistic synopsis of how you behave, how you react in different situations and how you manage it in social situations and with other people.

2) They and you go through their findings and have a long discussion about it and how it relates to other people and so on.

3) Here's the question: Do you think that you would be able to notice something that you might learn from their observations and the discussion to improve yourself or be, as they say, a better person?

If you say at least "perhaps", then you aren't a computer. A computer cannot look at it's own program and improve it in a way not written in the program. Now a human being can understand just how he or she has behaved, what has been his or her program and change it. That's what consciousness is.

A computer cannot look at it's own program and improve it in a way not written in the program. Now a human being can understand just how he or she has behaved, what has been his or her program and change it. That's what consciousness is. — ssu

I sense something fishy with that statement... I think the last line is the most fishy. We do not know that being programmed deterministically rules out consciousness because we cannot rule out that human beings also behave deterministically. The computers physical bits might be different to us humans, but we still have those bits and in theory we could see our brain's individual molecules, atoms, electrons and so forth in action.

Also, computer programs exist that improve their "own" code and chip design. One of the great fears of some computer scientists is the AI Singularuity - the point where computer self improvement becomes a runaway unstoppable process leading to some sort of hyper intelligence.

Also, computer programs exist that improve their "own" code and chip design. — Kippo

Please read carefully what I said. Turing Machine simply cannot perform the task "do something else than what is given in your program in a way not defined in the program. Whatever neural network mimicking machine deep learning we are talking about, IN THE PROGRAM there has to be specific instructions how to learn, how to rewrite the program. An algorithm following Turing Machine cannot do anything else. This is crucial to understand because it goes to the mathematical essence on just how a Turing Machine and an algorithm works. This is also the reason why computers can win in games: there are confined rules what to do and a game cannot evolve to something totally else with different objectives and different rules. This is based on what a Turing Machine does.

So can AI find this "singularity"? Well, we have many crucial definitions on the way to it that we even now don't understand. Just look at the various debates around here. My point isn't that it is impossible, the point is that currently we are not there yet. A lot has to happen.

But what is typical for us is that we believe that the present scientific paradigm tells everything we need there is for everything to be solved. So was with the mechanical world-view of Newton's time and so is now.

Morality is context based. Choice is need/context based. Consciousness is the belief we are aware of being. Our human machines are coded to offer a sense of being. When the machine fails consciousness does not exist. I think I think therefore I think I am.

The idea of the Turing test involves interaction between two open systems. This implies that the dispute over the significance of the Turing test is independent of the dispute as to whether humans or machines are automata.

For whether or not a human or machine is considered to be an automaton depends upon one's definition of their conceptual boundaries across space an time. Is a machine that suffers an internal fault the same machine running the same program? Are sensory inputs considered to be part of the machine's operation? etc. etc.

Please read carefully what I said. Turing Machine simply cannot perform the task "do something else than what is given in your program in a way not defined in the program. Whatever neural network mimicking machine deep learning we are talking about, IN THE PROGRAM there has to be specific instructions how to learn, how to rewrite the program. — ssu

And what makes you think humans do not have these limitations? The way our brains function and create new connections is based on a fixed set of rules.

The interesting thing about the AI "singularity" is that conceptually an AI could rewrite it's base code in a way a human never could.

The interesting thing about the AI "singularity" is that conceptually an AI could rewrite it's base code in a way a human never could. — Echarmion

Yes but there are complications in that concept because what is the it in "its"?? Humans have a body, but computers can connect, So I can see why some might interpret the singularity as one gigantic entity. It's life Jim, but not as we know it?

Yes but there are complications in that concept because what is the it in "its"?? Humans have a body, but computers can connect, So I can see why some might interpret the singularity as one gigantic entity. It's life Jim, but not as we know it? — Kippo

I don't see how that's a complication. The concept of "self" would obviously be different for an entity that could, say, copy itself. But that seems unrelated to the topic.

And what makes you think humans do not have these limitations? The way our brains function and create new connections is based on a fixed set of rules. — Echarmion

Well, we can argue if humans are conscious or not! Or think about it in this way: what does it mean to be creative, to have a new idea? Did someone tell you exactly how you should get a new idea?

The point here what I try to make and I've described in the thought experiment above is this: we can easily understand the decision making system we ourselves use and alter it in a creative way. It doesn't mean that Computers cannot emerge to have AI (and that naturally depends on the definition of AI), what it means that how Turing Machines work now cannot do that. They surely can (likely even at the present) fool us to believe that they are a living person when you are just interacting with a computer program.

Yet that doesn't make the program having AI as it simply follows a well written software, an algorithm. That's all what Turing Machines can do. Sorry, but that is the goddam definition.

what does it mean to be creative, to have a new idea? Did someone tell you exactly how you should get a new idea? — ssu

It means that you can create amalgams of previous experiences or ideas. All new ideas consist of previous experiences. A purple polka dotted people eater can't be thought of without having the concepts of purple, polka dots, people, and eating prior to creating it in your mind.

Most new ideas arent useful unless they apply to the world in some way. Computers can be programmed to assemble information in unique ways and then try to apply it to some goal in the world, and its usefulness is dependent upon how it relates to some truth in the world.

Yet that doesn't make the program having AI as it simply follows a well written software, an algorithm. That's all what Turing Machines can do. Sorry, but that is the goddam definition. — ssu

The obvious counter argument is that human brains also just follow a well written software. You say we can "alter our decision making system", but this is true only to an extent. The logic behind the decisions stays the same. We cannot simply incorporate entirely new inputs of sensory data, or change our perception to include or exclude dimensions.

It means that you can create amalgams of previous experiences or ideas. All new ideas consist of previous experiences. A purple polka dotted people eater can't be thought of without having the concepts of purple, polka dots, people, and eating prior to creating it in your mind. — Harry Hindu

And that is quite different from a Turing Machine which basically uses simple math to follow an algorithm. What we do extremely well and are masters in, and computers might do in the future, is recognizing patterns. This importance of patterns is the reason why math and computing is so dominant. Yet we can do even better: we can handle information that has no pattern, is unique. We have this utterly incredible ability to make a narrative: First happened this, the happened a totally new thing...then Harry Hindu made a comment from another perspective. That's not computation. You cannot extrapolate from the start a pattern that will tell the rest (and your comment). There is no pattern to be computed. And that makes us so awesome compared to Turing Machines.

Most new ideas arent useful unless they apply to the world in some way. Computers can be programmed to assemble information in unique ways and then try to apply it to some goal in the world, and its usefulness is dependent upon how it relates to some truth in the world. — Harry Hindu

And typically you need the human to choose just what is useful. In a nutshell, computers have a really big problem of 'thinking out of the box'. It really is a theoretical, logical problem for them. I think that people are simply in denial about this because basically they don't understand just how a Turing Machine works.

The obvious counter argument is that human brains also just follow a well written software. — Echarmion

Then 'the software' simply isn't a traditional mathematical algorithm.

Then 'the software' simply isn't a traditional mathematical algorithm. — ssu

Again, how do you know that? In a deterministic universe, can not everything be expressed as an algorithm?

Again, how do you know that? In a deterministic universe, can not everything be expressed as an algorithm? — Echarmion

No. Of course not.

Not only is the Laplacian determinism false, but also then you would have the Entscheidungsproblem answered differently, which was proven to be negative exactly by Turing with the idea of a Turing Machine. The Church-Turing thesis has importance here.

If I lost you here, I'll try to explain this as simple as I can what I mean.

a) Assume that everything can be expressed with an algorithm in the universe. This means that there is a specific algorithm explaining every phenomenon etc in the universe.

b) The above would mean that there is a positive answer to the Entscheidungsproblem: there would be an algorithm to decide whether a given statement is provable from the axioms using the rules of logic. This is just how algorithms as functions work.

c) Turing (alongside Church) showed that this isn't the case.

d) It's not by accident that Turing Machines are the theoretical structure of all computers. Hence this problem isn't just something that can be evaded. This might not be a practical obstacle as many things can easily be solved by algorithms. The problem only comes when the situation isn't routine and the computer/software should "think out of the box".

e) As I said, we humans don't calculate everything. We can handle information that hasn't got a pattern and still make sense of it.

The Turing test is used to check whether an AI (artificial intelligence) is at human-level intelligence or not. — TheMadFool

I don't buy this. By this logic, If there is a test to communicate with a squirrel and convince the squirrel that the entity at the other end of the test is a fellow squirrel, then humans have not yet achieved the intelligence of a squirrel.
I think AI will have long since surpassed humans in intelligence and consciousness before one is capable of imitating a human to this degree.

And that is quite different from a Turing Machine which basically uses simple math to follow an algorithm. What we do extremely well and are masters in, and computers might do in the future, is recognizing patterns. — ssu

Computers do recognize patterns of on and off logical gates. What I see you doing is making a lot of claims about what humans can and what computers can't do, but no explanation as to why that is the case. How and why do you recognize patterns? How and why does your mind work?

And typically you need the human to choose just what is useful. In a nutshell, computers have a really big problem of 'thinking out of the box'. It really is a theoretical, logical problem for them. I think that people are simply in denial about this because basically they don't understand just how a Turing Machine works. — ssu

In order to deem something as useful, you need goals or intent. Computers can be programmed with goal-oriented behavior and use the information that they receive through their sensory devices to achieve that goal. Something is useful if it accomplishes some goal.

The Turing test is used to check whether an AI (artificial intelligence) is at human-level intelligence or not. — TheMadFool

No. That's not the Turing test. It is a significant mistake in understanding what the Turing test is, and a mistake easily avoided by doing 30 seconds of research. As no one (or I missed it) has yet in this thread about the Turing test described the Turing test, I will provide. Courtesy Wiki:

"The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech.[2] If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

Not a word about AI. Not even a thought about AI.