(October 13, 2018 at 11:23 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: I disagree. If a disembodied AI somehow evolved in the data center it may be reasonable to suppose there is no reason for it to possess the circuitry to understand pain as associated with physical damage to a robotic body operating in a punishing physical environment. But if it were purposedly designed and implemented in the data center then it can be given the circuitry to understand pain.
The whole point of Searle's Chinese Room problem is to demonstrate that what you are trying to do is impossible no matter how close you get to human level intelligence. There is no magic bullet that will make it happen just because it is more advanced.
If a human can't do it in place of a computer then how can we hope that a computer can do it?
Humans have circuitry to understand pain, but these neural circuits won't get triggered by looking at arbitrary Chinese symbols.
(October 13, 2018 at 11:23 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: Pain circuitry does not respond only to damage to a robot body. It responds to any incoming signal mimicking what a damaged robot body will generate. So if we tell the Chinese person to manufacture alarming but factually baseless texts telling of grave trauma, a disembodied AI in a data center can conceivably not only understand pain, but can experience pain just like an AI hooked up to a real robot, and return commands to execute the appropriate response behavior.
How does that work then? How can you manufacture alarming but factually baseless texts telling of grave trauma to cause pain to a disembodied AI?
How would you give circuitry to a disembodied AI in a data centre to understand pain? What would trigger the pain? Why? What would the effect of this be? How can you have pain without a sense of self? (which requires being embodied). What would the function of pain be?
It sounds easy in theory when you talk about these things in general but in practice it's impossible to know where to even start without narrowing it down a lot more and defining key concepts.
This relates to another issue in AI. Just because we label some function in an AI as being something like emotion, pain, consciousness etc it does not necessarily mean that it is the same as what we have labelled it.
So we could program a module, call it pain and hard code a certain reaction to it. But is it actually pain or merely a hard-coded subroutine? The answer is whether it performs the same functionality. And that means being embodied, whether physically or in a simulated world.
