The Nation's Pulse / Reflections in a Silicon Eye
Kenner, Hugh
December that Reagan is misunderstood if judged by his five hours a week of official meetings. "Outside his allotted five hours, Mr. Reagan is not simply reading Variety. He is...
...Is "consciousness" perhaps just lots of smarts...
...A. (Pause about 30 seconds and then give as answer) 105621 Q' Do you play chess...
...Little by little, that's the strategy...
...Unable to lay a glove on the President, or at least unable to get in a good punch, the press has gone after Mrs...
...An eye still more cold was cast by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, whose 1972 What Computers Can't Do (second edition, 1979) came down hard on, among other things, any hope that a disembodied " b r a i n " might emulate decades-long experience of knowing the world's variousness through the senses of a mobile body...
...I'll be as impressed as Doug Hofstadter when a program plays championship chess, and I'll still withhold the concession that it understands what it has done...
...VP: My prospective customers have never seen a demonstration of the system...
...Probably not...
...Conceived in the dawn of the computer age, it has remained the classic way to examine the question, whether machines t h a t can think are thinkable, and wonderful though it is for wit and concision, any Bible that uses it as a Book of Genesis is already committed to the Silicon God...
...Example: s e l f - c o n s c i o u s n e s s . There's the rub...
...For a crisply playful approach see Raymond Smullyan's I~hat is the Name of this Book ? 1978, ch...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982...
...Scientific American has just finished phasing him in as successor to Martin Gardner, whose "Mathematical Games" was for twenty years the main reason many people bought the magazine...
...in solid state physics and an associate professorship (computer science) at Indiana University, has been quietly moving "Mathematical Games" to a different turf altogether...
...and mishaps "may" hedges against are technical not philosophical...
...Turing estimated in 1950 that by A.D...
...Put a skeptic in one room, put a machine and a human _in another...
...It has claimed a victim, Nancy Reagan...
...Minds exist in brains and may come to exist in pro"The Mind's I, Basic Books, $15.50...
...Reporters then had her husband to kick around...
...and "Tell me more...
...I'm typing this on a computer...
...ELIZA in fact explicitly simulates a Rogerian or non-directive psychotherapist who spends the hour uttering variations on "Why do you say that...
...Much that is of value to human beings seems inextricable from the experience of a lifetime, i~acurred over years and amid the experience of aging...
...It smacks of a backhanded effort to attack Reagan himself, and'I am told this is precisely the way he interprets the rough treatment of his wife...
...VP: This is ridiculous...
...Men's colognes tob...
...RI: It is your move...
...TELETYPE: What do you mean this is ridiculous ? VP: Is there any reason why I can't-use the computer now ? THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 27 TELETYPE: T e l l me more a b o u t y o u r p r o s p e c t i v e customers . . . . The VP had thought he was in touch with a programmer named Bobrow...
...Weizenbaum's moral tract being easier to allow for, the Dreyfus book is the one rigorous enthusiasts should defang if they can, and it's instructive that Hofstadter doesn't really try...
...Need it only be instantiated in cells...
...Send for free sample and fragrance list...
...moreover, that once attained in practice it will deserve to be called Intelligence, not simply a knack for folloWing instructions rapidly...
...Though ELIZA understands nothing of what you say, it is deft at purely grammatical transformations, letting the keyword "like," for instance, cue it to answer "You are like my father in some ways" with "What resem-" blance do you s e e ? " or par[ying "You are afraid of me" with "Does it please you to believe I am afraid of you...
...These are the sophisticated intellectual games of our era, t h e i r premise that the complex arises by stages from the simple...
...VP: Of course it does...
...Reagan the dummy . . . . The members of his staff are Mr...
...I'm sure I d o n ' t know...
...A note in The Mind's I calls What Computers Can't Do " t h e most sustained and detailed criticism of the methods and presuppositions of the field," which is true but tends to suggest it's no dragon really, "while the bibliography to G6del, Escher, Bach says " I n t e r e s t i n g to try to refute . . . . It is important to have people like Dreyfus around, even if you find them very i r r i t a t i n g . " Elsewhere in GSdel, Escher, Bach (p...
...lb) Example: We are systems and we are self-conscious...
...la) gives no apparent trouble, since if you're not self-conscious you're not reading this but occupying space in a home for the dim...
...And while I'd undertake to teach the multiplication table to anyone, I ' d make no claim that just anybody at all could be awakened to The Pisan Cantos, or for t h a t m a t t e r to The Pardoner's Tale or to Go, Lovely Rose...
...TELETYPE: Why do you ask...
...Ah but, says Searle, it is conceivable t h a t you could remain wholly outside a subject ( e . g . , Chinese poetry) while not bouncing remarks off it like ELIZA but discoursing at a seemingly expert level, provided only you had enough rules of procedure...
...90 Water St., Dept...
...VP: I might be able to make some additional telecomp sales...
...Let each strenuously claim to be human...
...Alas, the very year ELIZA was announced a kosher shrink named Colby told readers of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases that the fine new program was just what the doctor ordered, not least for an overworked doctor, and before long frantic souls were pleading with Weizenbaum for a little time with ELIZA to straighten themselves out...
...Why not in silicon...
...No, I don't think so...
...He is his administration's best salesman and spends much of his time lobbying...
...grammed machines," say Hofstadter flatly...
...Gardner, no mathematician at all and puckishly proud of it, delighted in card tricks, magic squares, the Oz books, and the conceptual regularities he could smoke out of such boyish pleasures...
...This means that Artificial Intelligence, since the 1960s the White Whale of innumerable research grants, is feasible in theory...
...Is such ability in fact the same thing as "understanding...
...He's exhilarating company...
...What's a s e l f ? What's consciousness...
...That would be highly sophisticated performance, not at all bravado and bluffing, yet it would not be understanding...
...2b) Inference: A sufficiently intricate manmade system can resemble you and me...
...How many of his readers have noticed that by way of showing it was human the machine got its addition wrong...
...Whether the envisaged machine did the same kind of thing he professed not to care at all...
...Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces...
...A: Yes...
...Reagan with a vengeance, criticizing her for haughtiness, a lack of social conscience, and lavish personal spending...
...The most critical piece was a Newsweek cover story last December which, while scrupulously accurate in all details, held Mrs...
...The skeptic in T u r i n g ' s Test knows he may be dealing with a machine, whereas the VP had been sure he was dealing with Bobrow...
...What c o n s t i t u t e s T ? " and in the new Hofstadter-Dennett book, The Mind's I, t h e r e are 27 pieces by 18 contributors that prod at such questions as though they had just now been asked...
...plus $2.00 delivery charge first bottle, 50 cents each additional one...
...Would it feel like anything at all...
...So it does...
...Though the knowledges I allude to tend to get dismissed from discussion as hopelessly " s u b j e c - tive," I know I possess them and also know when some of my students have come to possess something like them, imparted I don't know how, mostly from the poem, if partly from me...
...Searle proposed a "Chinese thought experiment" in which (the details are intricate) he'd give answers in Chinese to questions in Chinese about Chinese texts, knowing no Chinese at all but guided by-a set of conversion rules ( " p r o g r a m ' - ' ) written in English...
...So w e ' r e back at (2a), the claim t h a t s e l f - r e f e r e n c e in a manmade system sufficiently i n t r i c a t e could deserve to be called self-consciousness...
...T u r i n g ' s classic "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," a candidate for anyone's list of the twentieth c e n t u r y ' s most f a s c i n a t i n g dozen p a g e s . I f the Spanish text of the Borges doesn't predate it, Turing's is the oldest contribution in the book, and i t ' s only 32 years young...
...Example (grossly oversimplified): The DNA code whereby you and I are something more than discoursing dolls ~s a set of rules for making replicas of itself...
...And let t h e skeptic decide, if he can, which is which...
...Hofstadter, an accredited scientist with a Ph.D...
...frofn one neuron whose working you can understand to your b r a i n ' s complex of ten billion, which you can't...
...They were some time straightening it out...
...Bobrow chanced to answer in exactly the idiom of the program: "What do you mean why am I being snotty to you...
...Yet there is no hint from them that they consider themselves the ventriloquists and Mr...
...And h e ' l l wonder, no doubt, at my stubborn lack of e n l i g h t e n m e n t , much as I wonder at so fine a mind entranced with what I judge a chimerical toy...
...When he finally rang up Bobrow and asked, "Why are you being so snotty to me...
...The criticism was considerably harsher than Rosalynn Carter experienced, even after the 1979 episode when she repeatedly interrupted her husband and provided her own answers to reporters' questions...
...What Searle claims is that programs however intricate can never hope to go deeper than ELIZA does...
...Hofstadter and Dennett rejoin that Searle's hypothetical Chinese test, though he makes it sound simple, entails a performance so inconceivably complicated the boundary between its successful execution and "understanding" disappears...
...Weizenbaum had cunningly defined a role in which his silicon know-nothing could sound plausible...
...You have only K at K6 and R at percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning...
...I cite the VP-ELIZA dialogue from Pamela McCorduck's breezy Machines Who Think (1979), not from The Mind's I where this ingenious program gets no more than passifig mention (three index references, two of them erroneous...
...What do you play...
...Essential Products Co., Inc...
...His response was Computer Power andHuman Reason (1976), a book evidently written by a kinsman of Jeremiah's and a-sour look indeedat anyone's inclination to delegate judgment to mechanized systems of rules...
...This stirs old questions, "What is self...
...2000, machines could be programmed so well an average interrogator would "not have more than 70 Any book, though, leads from strength when it can commence with an enigma byJorge Louis Borges and move rapidly to the late A.M...
...Artificial Intelligence simply needs more lab time...
...Their tools are improvised, and historically grounded philosophers may think of clever men trying to open an oyster with toothpicks...
...Tacitly dismissing much precedent Western thought as primitive or else theological, Turing in effect bypassed the tempting question, what it is we do when we think...
...But note the adjoining premise that you are a system...
...But would we know we d i d n ' t u n d e r s t a n d , if by some miracle of programming we could perform like that...
...What peeked through G3del, Escher, Bach and dominates the new book* Hofstadter has co-edited with philosopher Daniel Dennett is a set of propositions we may paraphrase as follows: (1) Systems, such as the trick sentences above, may refer to (discuss,--contemplate ?--) themselves...
...The computer, if only as metaphor, is omnipresent...
...Example: "The number 2 appears in this sentence 2 times...
...whether this is true in the strict sense logicians accord the word "system" may be another question entirely...
...What, for that matter, does it feel like to beyou...
...at $15.00 per oz...
...We are made of "trillions of self-referential molecules...
...Partly, they'd not have you think it's the best they can do...
...Example: "You have just begun Hugh Kenner teaches vamous things at the Johns Hopkins University...
...A New York, NY 10005 212-344-4288 Serving Wall Street area since 1895 interview," he wrote, "is one of the few examples o f . . . communication in which one of the participating pair is free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world...
...Consider that any neuron in your brain can only do what an adjacent neuron has told it to...
...He was actually typing to a program named ELIZA...
...The column that appears under his byline as "Metamagical Themas," an adroit rearrangement of its predecessor's letters, tends llke its author to be preoccupied with self-referentiality, a catchall theme that can seem infuriatingly cute until you begin to glimpse its ramifications...
...574), the only other mention of Dreyfus lists him among subscribers to a composite thesis at which I ' v e heard Dreyfus snort...
...Q. Add 34957 to 70764...
...The psychiatric SAVE UP TO 90% ON PERFUMES We've created our versions of Opium, Bal A Versailles, Joy, Oscar de la Renta, 1000, L'Air du Temps, Chloe, Shalimar, Norell, Halston Night, etc...
...en route to a well-deserved Pulitzer...
...And I d o n ' t mean the computer...
...reading the sentence you have just finished reading...
...Part of it--only a part--is lexical knowledge...
...True, the program is shallow however ingenious...
...Carter...
...People find what they think they will find...
...Dreyfus held in special scorn the Artificers' way of spinning grandiose predictions off small successes, a habit he likened to claimingyou were n e a r e r the moon for having climbed a tree...
...1945) emerged from academe into visibility three years ago, when his G~del, Escher, Bach became a campus bestseller (at $18.50...
...REFLECTIONS IN A SILICON EYE by Hugh Kenner Douglas R. Hofstadter (b...
...But programming is in its infancy...
...Part reaches back to childhood, when I first heard the name of Persephone (that " I " was a far different ' T ' ) . "Shall two know the same in their knowing...
...1) is best illustrated by the logician Kurt GSdel's 1931 proof of the incompleteness of all logically consistent systems, where the mechanism of the proof depends on making the system refer to itself...
...2) Manmade systems can refer to themselves...
...To that end he proposed the Turing Test...
...but observe that it wouldn't appear 2 times if it weren't saying it appears 2 times...
...Turing was a witty fellow...
...And w e ' r e back with Turing, though confronting speculations he dodged...
...It is the knowledge, for instance, that enables me to be sure that The Pisan Cantos is a moving, coherent work...
...By 1968 the following had happened: VP (the vice-president of a software firm): Do you think that I can use the computer this morning...
...Was Turing's Test met that morning...
...A dozen heady pages of The Mind's I have us pondering what it's like to be a bat...
...Here someone will generally assert that computers can only do what they are told...
...Before we go on we had better document our numbered propositions...
...TELETYPE: You seem very positive about that...
...For a large though special public he continues to be gratifyingly visible...
...2), the self-referentiality of manmade systems, is demonstrated by numerous computer programs which consult themselves and then modify themselves on finding reason to 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 disapprove what they see...
...But the situation was different with Mrs...
...Meanwhile, read his books...
...That sentence makes no sense at all until you permit it to be about itself...
...Part is body-knowledge: the experience of pronouncing cadenced words, the subconscious measuring of rhythm against my pulse-beat, and my musculature...
...Nor can they wholly forget that ELIZA's author, Joseph Weizenbaum, has abjured the faith: indeed, recoiled in horror from the idea that anyone could see his creation as more than an interesting toy...
...With practice and a good enough set of rules, he might score t00 p e r c e n t while understanding nothing...
...Yet how little of this knowledge can in any way be rendered explicit...
...But that these stages are traceable is uncertain...
...Everyone who has set examinations knows about the student who grasps little but tests well, and we've all met straight-A medicos we'd not trust a bellyache to...
...TELETYPE: Does this mean very much to you...
...his mailbag, abulge with offerings from the most playful (=creative) mathematicians in several countries, was what earned many a Gardner column citation in austere bibliographies...
...His aides operate freely in his name and often forget even that they are doing that...
...A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate...
...This assertion is in Hofstadter's judgment a copout...
...There was danger, he conceded in passing, that the example might "run away with what it is supposed to illustrate...
...Turing offered some sample dialogue: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge...
...TELETYPE: Why aren't you sure...
...Though its ability to make hollow but acceptable conversation has been impressing newcomers since 1965, ELIZA is little pointed to in the Artificial Intelligence fraternity...
...I have knowledge that I am confident is knowledge, though I have no way at all of reducing it to simpler terms...
...Reagan to a standard normally reserved for office-seekers alone, not their wives...
...What would it feel like, w e ' r e invited to wonder, to be a computer that had mastered the Chinese t e s t and could breeze through Turing's...
...Lyndon Johnson did less...
...Searle has us pretend we are executing that performance, and reminds us that vce know we don't know Chinese...
...likewise from one transistor to whole hypothetical hardware hierarchies, informed by layers of programmed organization...
...We're not bluffing either, we're following instructions, and if somebody out there chooses to read understanding of Chinese into our blind responses that's his look-out...
...Not surprisingly, she didn't measure up...
...ELIZA, you may have noticed, follows, never leads...
...A: Count me out on this one...
...Its secret, Hofstadter rightly remarks, is l i t t l e more than "A shrewd mixture of bravado and bluffing...
...The one critic H o f s t a d t e r and Dennett do attempt to refute is John R. Searle, whose "Minds, Brains and Programs" in e f f e c t denies that passing the Turing Test however triumphantly would entail the machine's ability to think...
...what m a t t e r e d was whether it could make someone think it was thinking...
...Let them both communicate with the skeptic via screen and keyboard...
...t h e s e "Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul" are reflected in its silicon eye...
...and no,hing was exactly what a machine would understand as it breezed through T u r i n g ' s and similar tests, glib about matters it was treating as so much Chinese...
...I never could write poetry...
...Reagan's creatures, not he t h e i r s . " And that says it quite well...
...Sad to say, there is a downside to the fairness in the coverage of Reagan...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
