Re: Challenge to the behaviourists, #1

From: Wolf Kirchmeir (wwolfkir_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:29:02 -0400

Allan C Cybulskie wrote:

> "Wolf Kirchmeir" <wwolfkir@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
> news:_yZ%c.25348$lP4.1649486@news20.bellglobal.com...
[...]

>>If you can't [give a defintiton of intelligence], you can't begin to design
>>an "intelligent" machine. It doesn't matter which definition you use, so
>>long as it's one that can be phrased in terms of the machine's behaviour.
>
>
> Isn't that what I was asking for: what qualities of a behaviour would allow
> us to classify it as intelligent [grin].

The problem with your request is that there is no "scientific"
definition of intelligence, and there cannot be. There can only be an
agreed-upon definition. Also, the qualities must be measurable, which is
not an easy task.

I'll repeat: "Intelligence" is used to refer many different kinds of
behaviour, and as often as not is a judgement rather than description.
Your comment on my point that "intelligent" is often inconsistent when
applied to cats and children reevals that you haven't understood this:
that a term with many uses cannot have a "scientific" definition, so
asking for one is pointless. Any "scientific" definition of intelligence
must apply to both cats and children. IOW, if we say that qualities {Q}
are signs of intelligence, we ought to be able to say that cat has an
intelligence of measure M1, and a child has an intelligence of measure
M2, depending on which qualities are observed, etc. You can't argue that
the cat is not "really" intelligent when it exhibits the kind of
behaviour you use to gauge the intelligence of a child; and any talk of
not using the same standards of intelligence for cat and child is so far
off the mark I wonder you even entertained the idea.

BTW, about the only commonality I can find in your usage of intelligence
is "learning." Much of the time you use "intelligent" to mean "able to
learn." I'm quite willing to accept that definition as a working one for
AI, but I'm quite sure that for other people it won't do. The main
reason? Most people want to believe that only humans are "really"
intelligent, and it's rather easy to make devices that learn.

BTW, "learning on its own" is not possible. No creature/system can learn
without input from the environment. It doesn't matter whether that input
is controlled by some agent or not. Hence my next comment, below:

>>BTW, any definition of "intelligent" that begs some notion of subjective
>>experience is useless for AI. I say this beacsue in your past posts I
>>detect a bias towards subjective experience. You can't observe
>>subjective experience. Not even your own: what we call "my experience"
>>is in fact what I "say" about it. I put "say" in quotes since symbolic
>>behaviour isn't limited to language. "Internal speech" is a response to
>>"subjective experience", it isn't the experience itself.
>
>
> Hmmm. I only tend to focus on subjective experience because behaviourism is
> normally touted as a philosophy of mind, and for me any discussion of mind
> has to include subjective experience, which seems to be the largest example
> of mind we have. When it comes to rational, or intelligence, the closest I
> get it talking about beliefs and desires, but those need not be subjectively
> experienced at all.

I avoid the use of "mind" for the same reasons I avoid the use of
"intelligent." The word has too many inconsistent uses/meanings. I can
usually tell what people are talking about when they use "mind," and
most of the time they are talking about their own behaviour, and more
specifically, some kind of "talking to oneself" (which, I must repeat,
need not be in nicely grammatical and coherent speech.)

The best I can do in any discussion of "intelligent" and "mind" is to
point out what IMO are inconsistencies or difficulties with the
concept(s) as deduced from the usage of those terms.

And I don't think "rational" is a descriptor, FWIW.

>>For a nice sidelight on this issue, see a current ScAm article which
>>reports experimenets in using virtual reality (VR) as a "distractor" so
>>that patients do not "experience pain." FMRI scans show that brain
>>activity associated with "experincing pain" is diminished or absent; and
>> patients report diminished "experience of pain" while engaged in VR.
>>Of course - they are experiencing virtual reality, not pain. It's
>>significant that the more realistic the VR, the less pain. The article
>>doesn't report what I would think is an obvious check: run some trials
>>in which patients are _not_ asked to comment on their pain while engaged
>>in VR. I suspect that the fMRIs would show even less evidence of "pain."
>
>
> I suspect that you are probably right, but probably not for the reasons you
> think. In order to experience pain, you have to have awareness of pain.
> Attempting to look for signs of pain may lead you to actually become aware
> of that pain and thus to experience it.

That's precisely what I said! I tried to say it in terms of that would
make sense of the fMRI observations, is all.

> Of course, it would still seem to be a safe notion to claim that the signals
> from the transmitters are still being received, but just not consciously
> acknowledged.

Well, that raises the question of just what you mean by "pain." There
was a thread about that some months ago. Read it.

Your comment implies that pain isn't pain unless it's experienced - that
until it's "consciously acknowledged" it's merely signals from the
nerves near / next to the trauma. That's a very common notion, used for
example by fishers spearing a worm on a hook. But since those "signals"
can and do affect the organism's behaviour even when the organism
doesn't "consciously acknowledge" them, many people argue that even
worms "feel pain"...

>>IOW, the investigators used the only means (other than brain scans)
>>available to measure pain - the patient's own response to pain. But any
>>response can trigger further responses, so it's important to observe
>>what happens when the response is not elicited. (NB how kids' responses
>>to pain inflicted by a sibling varies with the presence/absence of a
>>parent...)
>
>
> Ah, but this is a false assumption, BTW, since it doesn't mean that they
> FELT more or less pain in those circumstances, but that they only acted on
> it because they felt that there was an advantage in the one case to acting
> out on the pain, and not in the other. In short, the kids might be
> exaggerating the pain to get sympathy or their sibling punished.

Agaian, you agree with me, but appear to believe you don't. I repeat: We
can infer pain onnly from the organism's response, and that repsonse may
be under control of contingencies other than pain signals. The obvious
inference from this is that responses are poor measures of pain. Which
is what my reference to children implies. You pick up the implication.
OK, now what?

>>BTW, the author does not analyse the facts as I do; his use
>>of the term "distractor" indicates his bias, and IMO misleads him. All
>>"pain distractors" work by replacing pain at least partly with other
>>stimuli. VR works so well because it supplies a large and complex set of
>>stimuli, hence requires a large amopunt brain resources, hence prevents
>>the brain from responding to the pain signals. The experiment shows that
>>you can do via VR what pain killers do via blocking of signal paths, and
>>does a better job when the pain killers don't work well (as for burn
>>victims, for example.)
>
>
> I certainly hope you don't consider it the same method, however ...

?????

The aim is to prevent pain signals from being "consciously
acknowledged", so at some point they must be blocked. Chemical
painkillers do so by binding to synaptic receptor molecules, or
otherwise intefering with the chemistry. "Distractors" do so by
preventing the pain signals from getting past what exactly? the
thalamus? I don't know, but something like that. Both methods block the
pain signals, but do so differently.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Challenge to the behaviourists, #1
    ... >>can infer pain onnly from the organism's response, ... >>be under control of contingencies other than pain signals. ... otherwise disparate regimens with no common features. ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: Explain this brain paradox.
    ... In migraines there is often abnormal blood flows so the pain ... >>may be originating in blood vessels but I suspect it still involves the ... >>tissues surrounding the brain. ... Buried in your puzzlement is a confusion between pain signals and the ...
    (sci.med)
  • Re: Explain this brain paradox.
    ... In migraines there is often abnormal blood flows so the pain ... >>may be originating in blood vessels but I suspect it still involves the ... >>tissues surrounding the brain. ... Buried in your puzzlement is a confusion between pain signals and the ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: Explain this brain paradox.
    ... >> in actuality the pain is from an area adjacent to the brain,such as ... If so, during the preliminary stages of brain sugery,whilst ... > Buried in your puzzlement is a confusion between pain signals and the ... Cannabinoid receptor in many immune cells. ...
    (sci.med)
  • Re: I guess this is where I end up............
    ... become more and more etc.), volition, mental volition and kamma. ... accompanied by either pleasure, pain or neither. ... middle and then what 'trickles from' them or what the mind attaches to as ... I.e. physicalists ...
    (talk.religion.buddhism)