Thank you. I have drawn a couple of conclusions about this, but am yet thinking it over. I will post something later today. — Michael Zwingli

:ok:

Careful with the syllogism. Not that the computer, if it passes the test, is a person. It is that the computer is intelligent. — Caldwell

Even if it is so intelligent after all.

Start with current top notch datamining capability and computer recognition, lets say every comment here on PF and on other Philosophical discussion site (still, quite finite amount of discussion threads), then add a great English language program, and realistically you could have a program that would fool people most of the time.

And still it would be a simple ordinary computer program using algorithms "if....then" to produce the fooling. Nothing AI about it!

How to know that it's a stupid computer program? It's only as good as the human programmer has made it. Get the program to participate in dialogue that the programmer hasn't anticipated and soon you might find the flaws. The program cannot do what it isn't programmed to do. (Even if it has likely a mechanism programmed in it to do in this case ad hominem attacks, which would we a very human response).

Sameness is sameness is not a tautology, it's circularity.



Don't you need to establish what you mean by being this one before you can use quantifiers like any and all to demonstrate it? And why is it we feel justified in using quantifiers to nail down what a quality is? Gibberish is gibberish even if encoded in arcane symbols. Qualities are not ways of being the same, they are similarities in ways of being different. The fact of the matter is that 'identical' is an artificial concept that can only be real through the manipulation of materials as well as a bogus idea of what qualities are. You can make two ball-bearings impossible for an unaided eye to distinguish, but try to find such similarities in nature! Living cells can even distinguish one atom from another, of the same element! Distinguishing one thing from anther is only problematic by intervention to hide the difference or in the fantasies of rationalists. But what really gets hidden is what an idea really is, and I would think a philosopher would not wish to be party to such deception.

Okay, I might be a little out of my league in this discussion, but I have some thoughts upon this issue, nonetheless.

An unself-conscious and unaware organism that acts as if it's self-conscious and aware in a way that cannot be detected either physically or by observing its behavior is conscious and aware.
— T Clark — TheMadFool

The "p-zombie" is an obvious impossibility. An "organism" cannot behave as if it is conscious and aware if it is not conscious and aware. Such a situation can only pertain to advanced computer architecture, that is, to AI.

The Turing Test

If a machine can fool a person into believing that it itself is a person, it must be considered as AI. — TheMadFool

Sure, okay...

In other words, AI is a person. — TheMadFool

Slow down, please. This, so long as the AI can be rendered, can be made to be, sentient, that is, can be made able to experience rational thought (check), sensation (probably, in some senses), and feeling...emotion (this is doubtful to me). I doubt that AI can be made to experience emotion, but rather to experience the semblance of emotion. AI architecture can be made to replicate human neural, bioelectrical anatomy, and so produce rational thought in quite an efficient manner. The human experience of emotion, though, is more dependent upon brain chemistry than upon neural architecture, and I am doubtful that this can be replicated in AI. Without the experience of emotion, I am not sure if you can characterize any subject as "a person".

The premise underlying the Turing Test is:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's the principle of the identity of indiscernibles which, unlike its converse, the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals, is, last I checked, controversial.

The Turing Rule is the principle of the identity of indiscernibles and it's the premise on which the Turing Test is based. — TheMadFool

This is where I have had several pertinent thoughts. As someone deeply interested in language, my first thought regarding these two principles, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles and the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals, is that they do not represent conversive analogues of one another as they are herein stated in English. This is based upon a semantic distinction which I noticed immediately within the OP. This is because the nouns identity and indiscernibility are not directly analogous. The direct analogue to indiscernibility, an abstract noun derived from the adjective indiscernible would be identicality or identicalness, the abstract noun derived from the adjective identical, which nouns, both meaning "bearing utter likeness", have a much narrower semantic field that does identity which is ultimately an abstract noun derived from the Latin determiner idem, meaning "the same". Note that "the same" can mean "bearing utter likeness (to another)" or can mean "not the other, but the same one", in other words, "selfsame...the same as itself". Since this is so, the two lemmas, identicality and identicalness are more specific in their meaning, and so are the proper terms to use as analogues of indiscernibility. Of the two, I would choose to use identicality because of the morphological uniformity which it presents within the argument. Despite all this, I note that identity of indiscernibles is the terminology usually used for statement of the principle, and I only state my observation as an observation without demanding a change.

The symbolic representation of these two principles,

1. The indiscernibility of identicals: ∀x∀y[x=y→∀F(Fx↔Fy)]
For any x and y, if x is identical to y, then x and y have all the same properties.

2. The identity of indiscernibles: ∀x∀y[∀F(Fx↔Fy)→x=y]
For any x and y, if x and y have all the same properties, then x is identical to y. — TheMadFool

provides a more accurate means of stating the principles for a criticism thereof. Therefore, let the following obtain:

∀x∀y[x=y→∀F(Fx↔Fy)]
For any x and y, if x is identical to y, then x and y have all the same properties, or if two objects are absolutely identical then they must be indistinguishable from one another with respect to all of their properties;

∀x∀y[∀F(Fx↔Fy)→x=y]
For any x and y, if x and y have all the same properties, then x is identical to y, or if two objects are indistinguishable from one another with respect to all of their properties then they are identical.

My thought is that x=y→∀F(Fx↔Fy) is a valid statement, while ∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y is invalid. The argument ∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y is dependent upon the premise that x and y can be found to be indistinguishable based upon ∀F. I contend that this premise is false. I say this because of the inability of the human being to fully discern ∀F, utter discernment of ∀F not appearing to be achievable within reality. While x=y→∀F(Fx↔Fy) holds as a matter of logic, ∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y is utterly dependent upon the discernment of ∀F, which in actuality is impossible for the human being. In every case for which ∀F is not discernible, which I argue is every case in reality, identity, or more properly identicality is not discerned despite the appearence of indistinguishability. Beyond that, I believe that ∀F represents an ideal not to be found within the universe. I think that this is what Gary Washburn meant in stating that:

Identity is not an attribute. There is absolutely nothing it is "like" to conscious. Uniqueness is not a myth. — Gary M Washburn

since, therefore ∀F is not a reality, ∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y can never hold in the universe, and so x can never be the equaivalent of y in reality.

These are my thoughts thus far on the subject of these two principles, to which I have only now been exposed. Maybe all that I have to say is nonsense...

Nothing formal can 'identify'. Period. Identity is personal. Leibniz is subordinating reality to formal rules he constructs from question-begging the meaning of equivalence. Can the meaning of 'equal' or 'same' or 'indistinguishable' derive itself? If everything real is unique the equivalence of attributes is simply irrelevant to identity. From what I've read, and it's been a while, Turing only expected his 'test' to even be meaningful, let alone definitive, limited to very narrow technical statements. Of course, these days, AI technicians know no end of ambition, and arrogance, and others let paranoia get to them.

Of course, these days, AI technicians know no end of ambition, and arrogance... — Gary M Washburn

Haha, they'll learn when they're plugged into the Matrix...

Is a digital system a place? I thought it was a 'processor'. Consciousness is an interruption of a process.

Start with current top notch datamining capability and computer recognition, lets say every comment here on PF and on other Philosophical discussion site (still, quite finite amount of discussion threads), then add a great English language program, and realistically you could have a program that would fool people most of the time. — ssu

Yeah, my comment was rather charitable regarding the topic here. But, I already made a remark regarding the limitation of that particular test. The test itself is not what we could pass as test of intelligence or consciousness.

Time is difference without limit. That is to say, it is the difference each unique thing brings to it. In itself it is nothing, a bit of noise. But where it offers the rest an opportunity to recognize how empty the universe is without it there is a response implicit to that recognition asserting the worth of that bit of noise or anomaly, because it offers the rest of time the term it needs to be itself recognized of its worth. When a kid sighs in class wondering how the clock could be moving so slowly this offers all of us a kind of language, complete in every way, of being there and knowing what time is. A computer may be devised to pick up the outward forms of that language, but not the dramatic participation in it we all bring to it. The question, then, is over how long a period is AI to be tested? An hour, a day, a lifetime? Can a computer remember what it meant to be bored twenty years ago? Or know how to use the response of others at that time to anticipate the meaning they will take from our words and gestures now? And even continually revised and augmented by the interim experiences even though not directly interacting in those events during that interim? "Do you remember where you were.....?" Yes, the computer will 'remember' where it was, but will it know what that memory means to others, and what they will know it means to it? Isn't meaning personal? And, if so, isn't a computer completely and utterly detached from it? Just not a player in the drama that is what language really is? And, if so, why do philosophers distort this? AI technicians I get, but philosophers?

Maybe all that I have to say is nonsense... — Michael Zwingli

Possible but not necessary.

Even nonsense deserves a response that is more than a machine designed to fool us.

Come to think of it, who the hell do they think they are? However sophisticated the system, isn't there a culpability involved? To my mind, wherever there is an injury to a person involving a machine. there is no assumption of innocence on the side of the machine. The machine is always culpable unless there is malicious intent on the part of the person. Any shortcoming in the capacity of AI to avoid hurting or offending a human must be regarded as the intention of the maker. That, written in law, might dampen the enthusiasm of the whole AI crowd. I mean, if they can't navigate a human world how can they be permitted in it at all, except in the most circumscribed, safeguarded settings?