Is Frankenstein’s Creature a Machine or Artificially Created Human Life? Intentionality between Searle and Turing

Marco BuzzoniDipartimento di Studi UmanisticiUniversità di Macerata (Italy), e-mail: [email protected]

Is Frankenstein’s Creature a Machine or Artificially Created

Human Life? Intentionality between Searle and Turing

(Annual Meeting of the AIPS, The legacy of A.M.Turing, Urbino, 25-27 September 2012)

For more details: “Is Frankenstein’s Creature a Machine or Artificially Created Human Life? Intentionality between Searle and Turing”, in Epistemologia, 36(2013), pp. 37-54.

Introduction

“I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. […] His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein, chapter 5)

At a first reading one would say that Frankenstein’s creature is certainly artificially created human life. But on closer inspection we find that the monster’s ambiguous features reflect Frankensteins’s doubt as to its/his true nature. Is the creature some kind of horrible, very dangerous machine, without any knowledge of good and evil, or is it a man, whose wickedness has been brought about by the cruel thwarting of all of its/his hopes of entering the human family? This doubt might be expressed by paraphrasing the title of a paper written by Hilary Putnam in 1964 on AI: is Frankenstein’s creature a machine or artificially created life? Is it possible to suggest some clues or perhaps even a criterion by means of which to dispel or at least to tackle Frankenstein’s doubt?

3. Is Frankenstein’s creature a machine or artificially created life?

I’m going to answer these questions by discussing one of the main criticisms of Turing’s test: Searle’s thought experiment of the Chinese Room. Searle’s criticism is formulated in terms of intentionality, which he considers an irreducible property of the mind. However, paradoxically enough, his naturalism prevented him from properly understanding one of the most important points of Turing’s functionalism and behaviourism. To bring to the fore some important elements of truth both in the Turing test and in Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, we need to distinguish two different senses of intentionality: a reflexive-transcendental and a positive (empirical or logico-formal) one.

4a. Turing TestAccording to the criterion formulated by Alan Turing in his seminal paper of 1950, “Computing machinery and intelligence”, if the responses from a computer were indistinguishable from those of a human being, the computer could be said to be thinking.

4b. Turing Test and Searle Chinese Room

A concise version of Searle’s Chinese Room: Imagine a native English speaker […] who

knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols that are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese, but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

5. The ‘Robot Reply’

The “Robot Reply”: it is false that a program can only possess syntactical properties because a computer ‘brain’ can be put inside a robot endowed with a television camera that enabled it to ‘see’ and arms and legs that enabled it to ‘act’. Searle’s answer: the addition of “perceptual” and “motor” capacities does not add intentionality to any computer program, where intentionality is defined as “the feature of certain mental states by which they are directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world” (Searle 1980a, p. 424, n. 3). Searle’s point may be aptly illustrated by means of a comparison with the thought experiment devised by Evandro Agazzi in 1967.

6. Agazzi’s Thought Experiment

Agazzi’s thought experiment (1967) is the first antecedent of Searle’s Chinese Room argument, anticipating for example Ned Block’s “The Chinese Gym” (cf. Block 1978). Agazzi too argued against the Turing Test:

“if we accept for a moment that it would

really be possible to equip a robot with such electronic devices as would allow it to simulate perfectly the behaviour of a seeing person […], we may also imagine equipping a blind person (or simply somebody whose eyes were adequately sealed) with similar electronic devices, and teaching him/her to interpret the stimuli received through these electronic ‘sense organs’ (stimuli that might be for example of a tactile character). In this condition our person would be able ex hypotesi to behave as if he/she were seeing, without seeing at all.”

7. Searle and intentionality

Intentionality is for Searle a “biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis or any other biological phenomena.” (Searle 1980a, p. 424 )

Thus, a computer will lack intentionality if it does not duplicate – either mechanically or in any other way – the biological structure of animal brains. Accordingly, Searle should give an affirmative answer to the question from which we started. Frankenstein’s creature is not a mere machine, but truly human, intelligent and intentional life.

8. Is Searle consistent?Is the Chinese Room argument consistent with Searle’s claim that intentionality as such can be technically realized in a machine, provided it is made of biological stuff or imitates the specific biochemistry of the brain?

Searle’s dualistic perspective on causality (Dennet, Winograd, etc.).

9. Searle’s fundamental epistemological mistake

Searle does not fully understand the perspectival character of scientific knowledge. Whenever physics and chemistry grasp

certain law-like connections inherent to a phenomenon, it would be arbitrary to assume that the phenomenon is thereby fully explained. Moreover, it would also be arbitrary to assume that any other kind of explanation would necessarily clash with the one provided by physics or chemistry. Recognition of this fact is sufficient

to undermine all reductionist approaches, whether in terms of old-fashioned symbols and rules systems à la Turing, or in terms of distributed processing connectionist systems, or in terms of chemical-biological duplication à la Searle.

10. Brain is (not only, but also) a theoretical construal

It is true that Searle argues that every intentional state has an aspectual shape, in the sense that it is directed at an object only “under an aspect”. But he sees the brain or some of its properties as an ultimate constituent of matter or reality, and this is inconsistent with the thesis of the aspectual or perspectival character of intentionality.

11. Two senses of intentionality

Intentionality, as aspectuality, implicitly presupposes a different sense of intentionality, which is the very condition for understanding any determinate intentional act directed at any particular aspect of reality.

12. Ernst Mach: Intentionality and thought experiment

Ernst Mach’s concept of thought experiment (TE): TE and real experiment are both based on the ‘method of variation’.

TE and counterfactuality: “Isolated facts – writes Mach − exist only because of our limited sense and intellectual equipment. Instinctively and of themselves, thoughts spin observation further and complete a fact as regards its parts, consequences and conditions. […] A sea current carries exotic plants, animal carcases, finely carved wooden objects, and Columbus visualizes the far-off and as yet unknown land from which these objects originate.” (Mach 1905b, p. 232, Engl. transl., p. 171, original italicisation restored and translation slightly modified.)

13. The hypothetical character of the mind

The essential idea – which Mach failed to fully understand due to his radical empiricism – is that human mind’s ability to propose possible alternative scenarios to any given observed reality depends upon the fact that the mind is essentially capable of representing any reality actually given in a perception as merely possible (or, which comes to the same thing, of directing itself at an object in general, whatever it could be).

14. Can intentionality be implemented in a machine?

If we mean by “material reality” concrete, particular reality, which we can modify by means of our body, we cannot understand how intentionality in its transcendental sense could be implemented in a machine. What is counterfactual, as a pure possibility, cannot be realized in only one way without losing its character.

Here lies an important element of truth in Searle’s Chinese Room Argument. But Searle cannot consistently claim this point; for it may also be urged against any particular and concrete realization or imitation of the brain, including Searle’s biological one.

15. No intentionality without intentional acts

However, we find transcendental intentionality only expressed in particular intentional acts. Kant’s example of the hundred dollars illustrates this point very well: thought dollars exist only in the sphere of the possible, while real dollars occupy a specific place among the interactions between our body and the surrounding reality; but neither thought nor real entities could exist outside their mutual relationship. This means that, paraphrasing Kant, transcendental intentionality without particular intentional acts is empty, and particular intentional acts without transcendental intentionality are blind.

16. Turing and Wittgenstein In a sense, Turing’s Test is the other side of Wittgenstein’s private language argument: “what is left over – Wittgenstein asked − if I subtract the fact that my arm rises from the fact that I raise my arm?” According to our previous account of intentionality: absolutely nothing empirically detectable!

In the sense of Wittgenstein’s private language argument, Turing’s thought experiment is conclusive: if there were machines which took part in our conversations and cooperated with us in our actions, we would be unable to realize that their nature was not the same as ours. And this, pace Searle, applies equally to a robot made with screws and bolts as to an android composed of organic matter.

17. Limits of philosophy and science

Turing wrote:“I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper.”Philosophy is certainly supposed to alert us to the limits of our knowledge, both scientific and philosophical, but the question raised by Turing’s Test must remain open in a radical sense: it can be said not only against Searle, but also against Agazzi that in both cases the onus probandi can be shifted neither on the proponents nor on the opponents of strong AI, since they both know equally little about the object in question.

18. Other Minds and Precautionary principle

On the basis of this result, however, we may invoke a practical principle of great importance to our present problem: the practical precautionary principle.

Generally, our decision as to how strong the evidence should be for accepting a hypothesis as validated depends upon the gravity, in an ethical sense, of the consequences that might depend upon our erroneously accepting or not accepting the hypothesis. With regard to the present case, the precautionary principle urges us to include among human persons the greatest possible number of doubtful cases.

19. Conclusion: A question that calls for a decision

My conclusion has a certain similarity with that Putnam’s in the article that inspired my title:

“Robots may indeed have (or lack) properties unknown to physics and undetectable by us; but not the slightest reason has been offered to show that they do, as the ROBOT analogy demonstrates. It is reasonable, then, to conclude that the question that titles this paper calls for a decision and not for a discovery.” (Putnam 1964, pp. 690-691).

But this only follows if, contrary to the view that Putnam advocated in his paper, we do not labour under the difficulty that there is no problem of other minds. The evasive and positively (i.e. empirically and/or logically) inaccessible nature of intentionality in its reflexive-transcendental sense, which characterizes the human mind, encourages the highest prudence.

20. Back to our question Frankenstein’s creature is a machine or artificially created life?

Frankenstein, as a scientist, never came to a final decision which could have saved the life of his creature. Frankenstein’s creature would probably pass Turing’s Test or even some of its stronger versions such as the Cartesian Test. In this case, we could conclude with certainty neither that it is the duplication of a human being nor that it is a mere machine that perfectly simulates the behaviours of a human being. However, unlike Frankenstein, who chases the creature in order to kill it, we should give it a chance to enter the human family.

Thank for your attention!