Philosophy, Turing Test - Essay Example

?Topic: Philosophy For centuries Man had remained mesmerized by the workings of brain. The philosophers had always tried to judge how thoughts occur in our mind, how feelings are generated, how pain is felt, how senses are affected by emotions and so many other questions regarding our existence. Some considered these acts as done by soul while others regarded humors as responsible. The advent of science, especially medical science, had made these theorists to take a sharp turn in the direction of brain as the source and control room of entire human body. With this emerged various schools of thoughts which promoted specific theories of brain functioning and psyche. One of them is functionalism. Functionalism Functionalism in philosophy of mind is a school of thought that states: “…a physical or abstract entity is identified by its causal or operational role” (Floridi). It is a doctrine that negates the idea of internal causes and constitutions of various mental states. It rejects the idea of unseen and abstract, even structural causes for these states and believes that every mental state has a separate and distinctive function or role in its respective system. As far as the origin of this doctrine is concerned, its roots lie back to Greek civilization. The concept of soul projected by Aristotle seems to offer the elementary base for functionalism whose antecedent goes back to Hobbes’s idea of human mind as a mere ‘calculating machine’. However, this particular school had got fame in the last quarter of twentieth century. Moreover, functionalism is not merely restricted to the philosophy only; it is rather involved in almost every natural and physical field of science including psychology, sociology, even education. Functionalism in Psychology Psychology emerged as a science in the late 19th century and functionalism proved to be an important mile stone in its wider acceptance and visionary exposure. It rose as a protest against structuralism and added various functional aspects of human brain along with the structural ones that shapes the humanistic behavior. According to Coon, it is “…concerned with how behaviour and mental abilities help people adapt to their environments”, and in this way it defines the function of various psychological and mental states Invalid source specified.. Functionalism offers an alternative to behaviourism and identity theory of mind: one regards every mental activity as a particular behaviour formed as a habit through continuous practice; the other divides them into types that are further correlated to the physical events occurring within the brain. Functionalism projects that every mental activity that takes place in the mind performs a particular function in the physical systems. These mental states are realized on multiple levels each of which offers a complete separate system. Thus, human mind behaves like a computational machine which directs external behaviours of the man (Jaworski). Putnam’s Philosophy of Mind Hilary Putnam was an American computer expert, mathematician and philosopher who had caught special attention in philosophy of mind in around 1960’s when he had put forward his hypothesis of ‘multiple realizability’ (Figure 1). He argues that all living beings can feel pain, yet their reasons of pain are not the same. With the help of the example of animals, he further elaborates that every creature cannot have the same brain structure, and therefore same mental events (like pain, emotions, desires, sensations, etc.) cannot happen in everyone. Thus, he tries to imply that mental realizability differs from creature to creature as a result of which feelings and sensations differ, and this is so because each sensation is due to a physical property that differs. Figure 1 Putnam’s Philosophy of Multiple Realizability Moreover, he has also put forward the first formulation of this functionalist theory in the form of ‘machine-state functionalism’. It was based on the analogy between human mind and the Turing machine that can calculate any algorithm given to it. Thus, human mind is an unlimited long tape of Turing machine that is divided into memory blocks that scans whatever has been input so far for the relevant materials. Lewis’ Philosophy of Mind David Lewis was also an American philosopher known for his modal realism, a controversial philosophy about language. As far as the philosophy of mind is concerned, Lewis’ contributions are great. His philosophies of mind can be divided into two categories: reductionist metaphysics (Lewis, Reduction of Mind) and interpretationist theory of mental content (Lewis, Psychophysical and theoretical identifications). Lewis functionalism also favours the Identity theory: “If pain is the occupant of the pain role, then organisms that differ with respect to occupants cannot share the property of being in pain”. Thus to Lewis, a mental state is “the Rest-Order occupant of the functional role”. He explains it with the help of following calculations: Figure 2 Lewis' Functionalism Functionalism about ‘Common Sense’ “Common-sense psychology portrays the actions people perform according to their goals and not by the factors that causes them to do as they do” (Ratcliffe). This trend in psychology refers personal aims and ambitions as more important than any other factor in the determination of their actions and behaviors. Analytical functionalism deals with this particular concept of psychology. Analytical or conceptual functionalism is usually associated with Lewis and believes that “the theoretical terms are implicitly defined by the theories in whose formulation they occur and not by intrinsic properties of the phonemes they comprise” (Moore). As far as the ordinary and common linguistic terms are concerned, common-sense functionalism believes that man gets their meanings from his common sense and that common sense is generated through a particular state of mind. The arguments that Putnam and Lewis have offered in this regard seem quite true and reasonable. Putnam has proposed that man can correct and alter common-sense functionalism and as a result the “…creatures with the same functional organization as you will have the same mental states as you if and only if the internal mechanisms which realize their functional organization do not depend on the activities of things which themselves have minds” (Brown). This argument emphasizes the maturity of human mind as well as intellect that lets man to determine his own actions and behaviors other than being the man of impulse. Lewis has proposed a rather more comprehensive and accurate explanation of this idea of meanings. He has in fact offered a series of steps involving the general idea of deducing meaning of different sensations from personal concepts of them that is, the “…common sense psychological states are identical to states of the brain or central nervous system”. These steps are explained in details by Brown, and include: 1. Miniature Psychological Theory: man generates minuscule theories regarding various mental states. Such as: “When someone is hungry and sees food, he eats it and becomes sleepy. When someone is hungry and does not see food, he looks for food and remains hungry” (Brown). 2. After making the concept, man makes names of all the used theoretical terms, such as: hunger is the state that makes the man hungry, etc. 3. These terms and the theories are then transformed into one single long sentence 4. The next step is to define a “two-place predicate, T” (Brown). 5. The fifth step is to form the Ramsay sentence of the theory 6. In the next steps, these Ramsay sentences are modified and the theoretical terms are redefined. However, these arguments favoring common-sense are too much liberal as “…it attributes mental states to too many things, including things which intuitively have no mental life” (Block). Can a Machine Pass Turing Test? Alan Turing in 1950 published the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” where he proposed a question “Can machines think?” He developed a method to answer this question. That method is commonly known as an “Imitation game” and also called as “Turing Test”. The Turing test or the Imitation game is played between players. One is the interrogator who asks the questions, second is the human being and the third one is the intelligent machine. All the three participants are in different rooms and the task is for the interrogator that whether he is able to distinguish between the machine and the human or not. The interrogator is allowed to ask any question within a span of 5 minutes of its choice to distinguish between participants. If the interrogator fails to distinguish between the human and the machine then the machine is said to be Turing test qualified. But until now, there is no machine that succeeded to do so. Till now the machines who answer to the questions of an interrogator are based on their learning. They reply with the most matched and suitable answers in their memory but are unable to predict the result of alterations in their structure and develop the programs. However the Turing test sets criteria that for the machine to be called as an intelligent should have these four attributes that are: Natural Language Processing Knowledge Representation Automated Reasoning Machine Learning Now, here the question arises that whether there will be any machine who will be able to pass this Turing test ever? You will find number of answers to this question as there are number of philosophers who have shared their views in this context. Since 1950, there are many who criticized this test and similarly there are number of people who supported it. The Chinese Room Argument is one of the famous attacks on this concept. Till now robots are in control of the humans but still there have been major developments brought to the machines. Like in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue chess playing machine succeeded to defeat the World Chess Champion. With such achievements in field of Artificial Intelligence, it is also expected that in future there will remain no difference between the robots and the humans rather humans will get in control of the robots. This has been shown in the Hollywood movie Terminator in which the robots have become so much efficient that they can mutually work with humans. Now the latest studies are already coming closer to prove that yes machines can pass the Turing test. According to Kurzweil, it is predicted that computer intelligence is mostly likely to match the human intelligence and so will be able to pass the Turing test till 2029. Recently the IBM’s Watson system has passed Jeopardy and that is a great achievement by the Artificial Intelligence development. It is also expected that Watson will be able to pass the Turing test in future. Kurzweil shared his views about Watson in his interview that: “The system has amazing language processing skills even if they aren’t quite up to human levels. It also can assimilate vast stores of knowledge and retains that information in ways that meet or exceed the majority of humans.” (Saenz, 2011) It is expected that the machines will be able to talk and communicate in near future as the improved Watson language processing skills are getting closer; however the thinking ability of the machines may take up to 20 years. Turing test demands that the machine should answer the questions as like the humans. For example it asks the questions that are related to the emotions but the jeopardy test is not as demanding and that’s why, Watson was able to pass the jeopardy but failed at Turing test. Indeed Jeopardy test was also a big challenge which has brought the technology closer to the goal that is to pass the Turing test!!! There are number of objections that have been made regarding the Turing test like thinking ability is only the attribute of humans and it is not possible for the machines to think. Secondly it is also objected that if the machines with thinking ability are invented then it will be quite dreadful scenario. It is believed that machines will never be able to have emotions like having friendships, sense of humor or falling in love. There are number of mathematical objections to this test as well like Godel’s incompleteness theorem and halting problem. Shieber commented in favor of the Turing test and proved its reliability. In addition, there are number of other philosophers who talked in favor of Turing Test. But still there is a big discussion that either the Turing test criteria is justified to be considered as the passing test for measuring machines intelligence? In my point of view, yes it is! Because if you want a machine to be truly intelligent then it must stand as equal to the human senses. Turing test is the one that actually measures up to this level and thus it is much sufficient test to measure the thinking ability of any machine. The achievements of Turing Test prove its efficiency like none of the machines is able to still pass this test. AOLiza, IRC chatbots, Loebner Prize, CAPTCHA all are the achievements of Turing test making it an efficient test to measure the intelligence. Conclusion Thus, we can say that to pass a Turing test is not a compulsion or necessity to conclude a person capable of thinking and possessing intelligence. Though Turing test appears to be quite effective for assessing computers, it is not that much effective in certain social and ethical issues. All this is so because a computer works on fixed instructions, even the Turing machine; whereas there is no limit to the reasoning and logic of human mind (Teuscher). So the limitlessness cannot be measured by limitedness. Moreover, mind takes care of the ethical values and other priorities also; whereas Turing machine works neutrally and possesses no concept of ethics at all. Therefore, to suggest Turing test to declare someone capable of thinking is mere foolishness. Works Cited Block, Ned Joel. Readings in philosophy of psychology, Volume 1. USA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Brown, Curtis. Functionalism: Philosophy of mind. 18 september 2009. Dennett, D. C. "Real Patterns." Bermudez, Jose Luis. Philosophy of psychology: contemporary readings. Ed. Jose Luis Bermudez. Illustrated. New York: Routledge: Taylor & Francis, 2006. 288-309. Floridi, Luciano. The Philosophy of Information. illustrated. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Herken, Rolf. a Turing machine is a very simple kind of computer whose operations are limited to reading and writing symbols on a tape, or moving along the tape to the left or right. This tape is divided into squares, any square of which may contain a symbol from a fin. 2nd. New York: Springer, 1995. Jaworski, William. Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction. USA: John Wiley and Sons, 2011. Lewis, David. 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