It's really clarifying where we stand. To take one small part, your key points of:
1. I’d rather say that you hit the problem of “no sensorimotor interaction no cognition, and therefore no consciousness. ...
2. I’d argue that sensorimotor capabilities are needed in the first place in order to develop meaning.
Through a series of questions (if I lost a leg, would I still be conscious? etc), I showed you CONCLUSIVELY that no sensorimotor interaction is necessary for pure or core consciousness.
Here we agree as you say:
"I understand your claim that no sensorimotor interaction is needed for pure or core consciousness."
So you are at this point agreeing with me that "no sensorimotor interaction is needed for access or core consciousness -- if meaning (semantic components) can be found" So this is progress.
You then say: However, from a developmental standpoint, I’d argue that sensorimotor capabilities are needed in the first place in order to develop meaning.
How could an agent have an internal mental state with meaning if it didn’t acquire it from experience?
These are of course great points and the essence of the question in point.
To answer it we need to start with a pure example of a pure sensorimotor system (camera/text writer). So we begin with this inside view of a face recognition program which is a simple example of a sensorimotor system.
Sensory Capability: camera observing face Motor Capability: writes "Aleksey Izmailov"
So I must ask you; where is the meaning in this sensorimotor system? Is it in the Searlean "squiggles of syntax" that says "If image of Type12927837 then "Aleksey Izmailov""? The Searle Argument says there is no understanding or meaning here and so - as such, no matter how complex the squiggles get - no machine consciousness.
Humans are developed from the sensorimotor ground up, into my realm of semantic reasoning or human thinking (conscious = audible or unconscious = silent). But conscious robots can be built from the top down due to materials and prior knowledge from human development, and it is in this top level that the meaning is in fact found. And the meaning is in its set of logical definitions, just like humans.
Thanks for your input,
Ken (TrueAndroids)
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I see what your point is. The problem is that intuitively, I’m much more comfortable with the sensorimotor ground up development approach (as confronted with the top down definition of meaning as you have argued).
For me, there’s no meaning in the face recognition program. However, I don’t fully agree with the application of the Searle argument that follows. I think an artificial system could end up having complex squiggles of syntax, of course. And such a system could not be claimed to be develop any meaning (specially, if the rules have just been added by the programmer). But I also think that an artificial system could be designed in such a way that it could learn the meaning during a developmental phase, thus acquiring (meaningful) rules from the experience of sensorimotor interaction with the world.
To put this argument in the context of the face recognition example: the face detection process and related output have no meaning to the program because the corresponding rule (If image of Type12927837 then "Aleksey Izmailov") has been just hardcoded. Therefore, if we somehow could look for the location of the associated meaning, it is located in the programmer’s mind. On the contrary, if you design an agent to autonomously learn by interacting with the environment, then its output could have grounded meanings. In other words, motor outputs are selected based on their causal implications (meaning) for the system.
I think the big problem here is how we define the concept “meaning”. Here, I was considering situatedness as an essential feature for the acquisition of grounded meanings. You say that is in top level where meaning can be found in humans, and I agree, but I don’t see how this human top-level meaning can also be considered meaning for agents different from humans… Hmmm, need to think more about this Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul
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Ok I see and agree; environmental concepts should be grounded by the sensory image of the object, as provided by the sensorimotor system.
You said: "But I also think that an artificial system could be designed in such a way that it could learn the meaning during a developmental phase, thus acquiring (meaningful) rules from the experience of sensorimotor interaction with the world. "
OK. But how does it work in a human child? The child must have received external knowledge that the name to associate with that object (image) is for example "David". Then, when presented with the object, via the sensory system, the child can use the motor system to point and say "David" . The general algorithm is:
1 Sensory system receives image of object 2 Child (agent) remembers (from being told prior) that the name of that object is "David" 3 Motor system effects speaking: "You are David"
We can see this exact same developmental process in my most favorite robot the REEM robot by PAL-Robotics. At first REEM does not recognize the person. Then he is told his name (receives external knowledge) in a "developmental phase". And then he recognizes the person (David). Here is the REEM sensorimotor system (agent) performing this face recognition learning:
If this is all syntactic based Searlean squiggles (no semantic components as in higher order thinking such as my prototype) is REEM conscious of what he is talking about? (Does he know the true meaning of what he is saying, or is he simply the syntax shuffler of the Searle Chinese Room?)
I still have to "draw the Searle Line in the Sand" and say this machine has not yet attained consciousness, and won't via this methodology alone. Syntax can't provide meaning, not even emergent meaning. Only the semantic components of computing can impart true meaning or consciousness to this or any such machine.
Could your envisioned developmental phase be equivalent to adding my 'self semantic reasoner' to the syntactic 'nervous system' of a robot? This is how I have envisioned it in my complete android invention system patent.
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Hi Raul, well as we can see from above I could not get you to see the machine consciousness I presented in my prototype. I also wasn't getting any response from Prof Searle at Berkeley who I asked to review it, and so I lost interest in the project and took it down from youtube. Without the AI experts acknowledging that what I have is TRULY CONSCIOUS (even if just access), then I will need to be rich to push it on my own. And I'm not. In 2006 Searle (Chinese Room) told me if my machine has semantic understanding and reasoning he would say it's conscious. Now he won't even talk to me and didn't even respond.
No other links to it.
Please Remember -*- If you hear someday that "the 'Semantic-Reasoning Web' is in fact Conscious", it was Ken Long who told you this would be so, way back in 2009. Thus I'm the Pioneer Inventor of Machine Consciousness.
Thanks for your comments and interest,
ken (TrueAndroids)
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Sorry it took so long to reply. I've been swamped with work. What you said about adding semantics to syntax through development (i.e. world sensorimotor interaction experience) does make sense to me. I think the big issues here lies in the difficulty to prove that a process like that is actually taking place in an artificial system.
For me to be convinced I'd need to see how the behaviour of the system develops over time as it interacts with the world (without any explicit or ad hoc programming).
I don't think you need to be rich to share your ideas with the scientific community. I'd say that what you need is to describe your ideas and experiments formally and submit the result to a peer-review conference or journal. Science is a social process, so you don't actually need the recognition and feedback of a single person, but the community. And of course, within any scientific discipline there are always different schools and different points of view and trends...
miel
continental
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