Re: The GLUT and functionalism

From: Matt Mahoney (matmahoney@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Mar 24 2008 - 15:55:23 MDT


--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin@rawbw.com> wrote:
> Question: would you consider that a given program had passed
> the Turing Test under these conditions?
>
> A. All Earth's six hundred million English speaking people interact
> by teletype with it, some specialist computer folks up to several
> thousand interactions each.
> B. Each interaction consists of a question to the program/human
> of less than 10,000 characters. The reply of the program (or
> human, the interviewer does not know) is always of about
> the same length and complexity of that of the question, i.e.,
> around 10^4 characters.
> C. Each interviewer is convinced that as of 2008, the entity typing
> back responses must be a human being.
>
> My guess is that your answer would be "yes, if it is a program then
> it has passed the Turing Test", and that, moreover, the remote
> entity (whether human or not) was conscious and had internal
> experiences.
>
> Now, what if it is revealed to you than an Alien intelligence had
> deposited this program/machine in the possession of an Earth
> person collaborator, and that the computronium based machine
> was merely doing a table lookup on all the possible 26^10000
> possible keyboard inputs? In other words, the Alien had somehow,
> perhaps by making untold trillions of copies of himself, had personally
> answered all possible 10,000 character questions, and then had
> just left the device to parrot his responses? You think it's still
> conscious?

Suppose you have a 3 way Turing test between a human, a GLUT, and a human
whose memory is set to read-only at the start of the test (or equivalently,
whose mental state is reset after each question). Is the read-only human
conscious?

-- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com



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