University:
Boston University
Course:
CAS PH 630 | American Philosophy
Academic year:

2024
Views:

438

Pages:

15
Author:

Brenden Trevino

“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950): The “Imitation Game” • Turing publishes his article in the philosophical journal Mind. • He reads out portions of it to his student Robin Gandy and giggles. • Normal Malcolm writes to Wittgenstein to ask whether the article is a joke. • Wittgenstein replies that he suspects it is “no leg-pull”. Turing 1950, the “Imitation Game”: Gender as a Control The Cartesian Turing Test for “Intelligent” Machinery The Turing Test as a Social Experiment in Phraseology Wittgenstein (1938) What is called “winning” in chess might be losing in another game. “What are we to say now?” –That is our theme. What Turing is Not Doing with the Turing Test • Trying to prove that machines can think. • Assuming that behaviorism is true. • Trying to prove that machines are conscious and capable of emotion. • Trying to explain or deny the fact of consciousness. • Trying to prove that humans are machines. • Trying to prove that machines are indistinguishable from humans. • Merely stipulating an operational or behavioristic definition of “intelligence”. • Assuming that disinterpreted operations with signs are capable of grounding meaning. What Turing Is Doing with the Turing Test • Showing that one cannot prove a negative result – e.g., that machines cannot think – because as yet one does not have a clear enough concept of “thought”. • Showing us how we might explore together the “emotional” effects of computational machinery on our ways of expressing ourselves. • Framing a repeatable, social, philosophically-minded human-to-human experiment in phraseology, or ordinary language, in life. Turing 1950: Arguments Considered 1. The theological objection (souls, immortality). 2. The heads in the sand objection (too dreadful). 3. The Mathematical objection (human minds escape undecideability). 4. The Argument from Consciousness. 5. Arguments from the disabilities of machines. 6. Lady Lovelace’s objection: Machines are not creative or surprising (answer: computational irreducibility). 7. Arguments from the continuity of the human nervous system (answer: randomness in discrete machines approximates this). 8. Arguments from the unpredictability of human behavior. 9. The argument from extrasensory perception. Searle’s Chinese Room Turing: “The Reform of Mathematical Notation” (1942-44) The statement of the type principle given below was suggested by lectures of Wittgenstein, but its shortcomings should not be laid at his door. Turing, “The Reform of Mathematical Notation” (1942-44) Symbolic logic is a very alarming mouthful for most mathematicians, and the logicians are not very much interested in making it more palatable. It seems however that symbolic logic has a number of small lessons for the mathematician which may be taught without it being necessary for him to learn very much of symbolic logic. In particular it seems that symbolic logic will help the mathematicians to improve their notation and phraseology. Turing: “The Reform of Mathematical Notation” (1942-44) We should conduct an extensive examination of current mathematical, physical and engineering books and papers with a view toward listing all commonly used forms of notation and examine them to see what they really mean. This will usually involve statements of various implicit understandings as between writer and reader. But the laying down of a code of minimum requirements for possible notations should be exceedingly mild, avoiding the straightjacket of a logical notation. Turing: The Reform of Mathematical Notation” (1942-44) It would not be advisable to let the reform [of notation] take the form of a cast-iron logical system into which all the mathematics of the future are to be expressed. No democratic mathematical community would stand for such an idea, nor would it be desirable. Turing, “Intelligent Machinery” (1948): The “Intellectual” Search We might arrange to take all possible arrangements of choices in order, and go on until the machine proved a theorem which, by its form, could be verified to give a solution of the problem ... Further research into intelligence of machinery will probably be very greatly concerned with “searches” of this kind. We may ... call such searches “intellectual searches”. Turing (1948): The Evolutionary Search It may be of interest to mention two other kinds of search in this connection. There is the genetical or evolutionary search by which a combination of genes is looked for, the criterion being survival value. The remarkable success of this search confirms to some extent the idea that intellectual activity consists mainly of various kinds of search.