Human Mind and Computers (An Uncanny Resemblance) - II

In part II of my blog Human Mind and Computers (An Uncanny Resemblance), we will be looking into the war and post war era (1940 - till date). This was the era which changed the days after, forever. The change so enormous that it changed the way we human think, and quite appropriately gave a name to the "age" that came, The Information Age. We the Homo Sapiens Sapiens has walked a long way from being hunter-gathers, in Stone Age  to farmers, in Bronze and Iron Age, to producer-consumers, in Industrial Age, and now to Information Seekers, in Information Age.

We no longer needed God for explaining things that we couldn't understand a few hundreds of year ago. The changes were sudden and shocking for many. But the few who could grasp the change dared to think beyond the horizon. They questioned their own existence, which is considered as the the epitome of self consciousness. Even though this question was asked millennia ago by philosophers in Greece, our contemporaries had a powerful tool with them, The Computers.

We changes and choices we made...

Humans were interested in know whether they (animate objects, more specifically humans themselves) were unique from inanimate objects like say a piece of rock or a guitar lying on your bed. Academia has long been in divided in the status of the brain as a computing machine since eons. In Artificial Intelligence community, the two divides are called Strong AI and Weak AI. While Strong AI predicts that humans are nothing but a mechanical machine which is bound by physical law just as a bicycle is or an airplane, but having a complexity in much higher orders and that machines can one day become more or equal in intelligence to humans in future. Please note that the usage of machine in this context specifically mean computing machine. They don't expect your toaster to talk to you! Unless, your toaster has a inbuilt speakers, microphone and more importantly a microprocessor attached in, which as a matter of fact is going to happen.

Whoa! A toaster that talks!

 While, weak AI predicts that animate beings are intrinsically different from inanimate objects. They hypothesizes that human mind is capable of conscious thought not bounded by physical laws and no matter how hard and complicated AI develops, machines cannot develop the intuitive thinking and self awareness as a human. Weak AI negates any possibility of a robotic apocalypse in future!

Weak AI vs. Strong AI debates are championed by several eminent philosophers, mathematicians and computer scientists on one side.Roger Penrose, a brilliant mathematical physicist, who also enjoys spending time in creating mathematics puzzles as a recreational mathematician. One of his famous creation is Penrose Triangle. Penrose supports weak AI hypothesis, although many of his contemporaries are in disagreement with him. Another famous academician Douglas Hofstadter, who is known for the famous Pulitzer winning book, Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid (or GEB in short) in non- fiction category. Penrose is a voracious supporter of weak AI and considers humans to have special ablities in areas of intuition and cognition, while Hofstadter maintains a strong view for strong AI, which he has explained in great detail in his epic book GEB.

Penrose, who argues in his book The Emporer's New Mind that human mind has this special ability of creative thinking because of a quantum mechanical processes present in individual neurons. He argues that human brain has a quantum mechanical component, which makes the computation in the brain both quantum computation and hypercompution (capable of doing infinitely many steps in a finite time). Penrose extended this idea further in saying that this is what gives up human Extra-Sensory Perception aka ESP. 

One might have encountered a eerie feeling when another person stares at you.

Penrose argues that this ESP and its similar kinds of phenomenon are because of quantum non-locality. Our mind are not localized in space, and can get inputs and get influenced by events which are not in direct contact with us. Penrose's quantum mind would be a milestone because it has been proven that quantum computers are a scale higher that the deterministic computer from which we are familiar. Quantum computers because of the QM phenomenon like quantum non-locality and in-determinism can solve problems which are inherently difficult to solve using a conventional classical computer.

Apart from Turing Test, there's another "experiment" which runs in a similar line, known as Searle's Chinese Room Experiment. Imagine a closed room with a person who doesn't have the lexical (vocabulary) and semantic (grammar) knowledge of Chinese language. We supply enough inputs of Chinese language inside the room and ask the person inside to produce outputs. After sufficiently long period of time, he will get the semantics of the language because of the patterns being present in the input. Every language has a pattern present, which makes it contain information. This is also known as entropy. A similar example for English language would be that whenever the alphabet “t” appears the most probable next alphabet is “h”. Over time, the person would produce outputs which confer to the Chinese language semantics; even though he might not understand a thing about what he is conversing. But the question here is, “is there an intelligent person inside the room who understands the language?”.  For us, he’s just a program which uses statistics and the heuristics to reply to a query.

Many supporters of Strong AI criticises Turing’s Test because of it’s anthropomorphic details, even though Turing took great care in making it as objective as possible. The main controversy comes because of the use of natural language for deciding the intelligence of machine. But anyways, it’s us who are judging the intelligence, since computers and machines have already proved their mettle in game playing and strategy making.

I remember a movie, I, Robot., a movie inspired by a novel by the same name by famous Russian sci-fi writer, Issac Asimov. The protagonist lead Detective Del Spooner played by Will Smith who is a robo-phobic cop encounter a robot, Sonny which can actually “dream” thanks to his positronic brain which his creator has installed in him. There’s one dialogue in the film between Detective Spooner and Sonny which particularly caught my attention,

Detective Del Spooner: You are a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny: Can you?