Ask A Genius 555 – Dogs Barking and Frankenstein, “Damn it”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Some more stuff on IBM – yada-yada. You wanted to talk about it some more. Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: I don’t remember where we exactly left off because I took a nap. We should look at old hand-wavey models of consciousness. There is a trend calling whatever something humans can do and animals can’t “consciousness” with an in-built assumption that animals aren’t conscious and humans are, which I don’t believe.
To this train of thinking, you should find things human can do like have language, recognize oneself in the mirror, having a sense of self which comes with seeing oneself in a mirror, and whatever this one thing was that people thought human beings can do; they argue this is what consciousness is.
Having language means you’re conscious, seeing yourself and recognizing yourself in a mirror means you’re conscious, it is not a good reason. At the same time, some of this stuff does help flesh out what we feel as conscious humans.
Language, certainly, facilitates some aspects of consciousness if you can assign a term or a shorthand for everything that may come up in your awareness; that’s helpful. Anyway.
Jacobsen: What about metaphors of consciousness like levers, gears, pumps, vacuum tubes?
Rosner: Up through the 50s and the 60s, there was the Dr. Frankenstein model of biology, where once medicine started making some headway and able to do stuff and understand the body. This got tied in with the mechanical-physical models that people had at the time.
With the novel Frankenstein being the first major work to discuss humans as machinery that could be repaired and resurrected, so, I feel like all those models of pumps that you mentioned get tangled in 19th century Frankenstein and then crappy horror movies of the 1950s, where scientists are always resurrecting people to bad effect.
But I’m sure that machinery model, probably, got tangled up in other models of consciousness and, in fact, there are still ideas of flow when discussing consciousness. Some of those models or ideas are not illegitimate. That bandwidth, the amount of information flowing through a system per unit time is not inapplicable to consciousness.
You could model consciousness as a game played on a board. If you set it up based on whatever the rules of consciousness are, you could animate modes of consciousness by moving pieces around on some board. But in practice, you need a flow rate of real-time of having a lot of cognitive and sensory information flowing through the system.
To get back to Watson and Google Translate, though, you could argue that they have an awareness of something at some really low level because the amount of information flowing through them and the number of things, the graininess, and the paucity of inputs means that whatever awareness they have is nothing like our awareness, and, furthermore, they’re not like awareness because they don’t have so many of the things that may not be necessary for consciousness; we associate them with consciousness.
Even though, Google Translate is about language. Google Translate does not have language like we have language because words in it do not have as much in them as us, or each meta-word. People argue that Google Translate has developed an internal efficiency with a meta-language, where each word in every actual human language is associated with the concept of that word in a synthetic language within Google Translate.
It has a landscape of the relationship among words. This landscape generally doesn’t use the specific words in the landscape, but some representation of the words in the landscape meaning “bread” in the different languages. But I haven’t read that much about it, though. So, I don’t know.
[Dog barking]
Jacobsen: We have guest speakers.
Rosner: Yes, the word or meta-word for “bread” doesn’t represent bread the way we represent it because Google Translate doesn’t have the sensory library to have the imagery associated with the bread.
[Dog barking]
Rosner: Damn it.
[Pause, swearing]
[End of recorded material]
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