SOCIAL and mass media, and films have often featured self-aware artificial Intelligence (AI), for good or for bad.
The simplest definition of consciousness is the awareness of one’s internal and external milieu. Without going through other hard-to-navigate definitions and theories of mind, cognition, or consciousness, or self-awareness, I shall state that in my opinion, AI cannot have cognition or self-awareness without consciousness. Just as an unconscious patient cannot have cognition or self-awareness.
In the neurological sciences, the “seat” of consciousness is the gray matter (neuronal cell bodies) that surrounds the periventricular areas that run from the upper pons to the mesencephalon (midbrain) and diencephalon (the thalamic areas), often called the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS). This is essentially a clinical definition.
If an infarct occurs in one side of the ARAS, a patient experiences a decrease in sensorium (consciousness). To be more specific, there is a decrease in the patient’s Glasgow Coma Score (GCS).
To be brief, a GCS of 15 means a fully awake and conscious patient, a GCS of 14 and 13 indicates a drowsy patient, GCS of 9 to 12 indicates a stuporous patient, and a GCS of 3 to 8 indicates a comatose patient.
AI does not have an equivalent of the ARAS. In other words, it is not conscious like awake humans.
To elaborate further, let me describe the “Chinese Room” of the philosopher John Searle.
According to Wikipedia:
Suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in programming a computer to behave as if it understands Chinese. The machine accepts Chinese characters as input, carries out each instruction of the program step by step, and then produces Chinese characters as output. The machine does this so perfectly that no one can tell that they are communicating with a machine and not a hidden Chinese speaker.
The questions at issue are these: does the machine actually understand the conversation, or is it just simulating the ability to understand the conversation? Does the machine have a mind in exactly the same sense that people do, or is it just acting as if it had a mind?
Now suppose that Searle is in a room with an English version of the program, along with sufficient pencils, paper, erasers and filing cabinets. Chinese characters are slipped in under the door, he follows the program step-by-step, which eventually instructs him to slide other Chinese characters back out under the door.
If the computer had passed the Turing test this way [The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by the great mathematician Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human.], it follows that Searle would do so as well, simply by running the program by hand.
Searle can see no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing behavior that makes them appear to understand. However, Searle would not be able to understand the conversation. Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
Searle argues that, without “understanding” (or “intentionality”), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as “thinking” and, since it does not think, it does not have a “mind” in the normal sense of the word. Therefore, he concludes that the strong AI hypothesis is false: a computer running a program that simulates a mind would not have a mind in the same sense that human beings have a mind. (To be continued)/PN
