Episode 13 min
0:00 in 2023 a large language model named gpt four passed the uniform bar exam scoring in the ninetieth percentile last week in our imaginary theater of the mind we listened as plato and mill debated the very foundations of justice and law but a machine that can master our laws forces us to ask an even deeper question not just0:27 how we should think about justice but what it means to think at all what is this faculty we call intelligence is it a ghost in the machine of the body or is it just the machine itself humming along tonight we bring two minds to the table who could not be further apart in one corner the father of0:50 logic and biology the man who saw purpose in every living thing aristotle and in the other the father of theoretical computer science the man who envisioned a universal machine capable of simulating any mind alan turing welcome mister turing i confess the concepts you work with are abstract i am a man of the observable world i look at1:17 a plant an animal a person and i see its nature its purpose its telos and i look at a series of symbols on a tape doctor aristotle and i see the potential for any thought that has ever been thought it's a pleasure you see i don't think we're as far apart as you might imagine1:38 we shall see let's begin with your famous game the imitation game i believe it's called explain it you claim it can determine if a machine can think not quite the question can machines think is too meaningless to deserve discussion it's a philosophical tar pit i propose we replace it with a real practical question go on imagine a2:05 human judge is having two text conversations one is with a human the other with a machine if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which then we should conclude the machine is for all intents and purposes intelligent so your standard for thinking is successful deception a clever parrot can mimic my words does it understand them of course2:30 not it's just manipulating sounds to get a cracker your machine manipulates symbols it's a difference of complexity not of kind but how do you know the parrot doesn't understand or for that matter how do you know i understand you can't see into my mind you can't observe my soul as you might put it i infer it from2:52 the coherence of your speech the appropriateness of your replies the evidence of a rationally principle at work exactly you infer it from my output my behavior the imitation game simply makes that standard rigorous if a machine's output is indistinguishable from that of a thinking being well what grounds do we have for denying it the title the grounds3:17 are simple a living thing has a nature a soul the vegetative soul for plants which allows growth the sensitive soul for animals allowing perception and movement and for humans the rational soul the seat of reason of noose this is what allows us to grasp universals to understand not just that something is but why3:46 soul soul soul i mean with respect that's a very elegant way of describing a black box you can't measure it you can't test it it's an assertion my machine is at least honest about what it is a system of states and rules but its rules are given to it by a programmer its purpose is external imposed upon4:12 it an acorn's purpose to become an oak tree is internal it strives of its own nature toward its fulfillment does your machine strive for anything some do we have machines that are programmed to learn they adjust their own internal states to get better at a task to win a game of go for instance you could call that4:37 a form of striving you could but it would be a poetic metaphor the machine doesn't desire to win it doesn't experience satisfaction in victory or frustration in defeat it executes a function its learning is just a more sophisticated function it has no potentiality no dunamis of its own okay but let's push on that the human5:07 brain what is it but an incredibly complex machine a biological one sure but it processes information neurons fire or they don't it's a series of discrete states a meat machine why is it impossible in principle to replicate that process on a different substrate like silicon because the process is not the thing itself you are confusing the tool5:37 with the user the eye is the tool for seeing but it is the soul that sees a brain is an organ the material cause of thought but the formal cause the essence of thought is immaterial it's the act of the soul abstracting the form from the matter a machine can't do that it is trapped in the matter6:03 i think you're drawing a line in the sand that you can't defend doctor aristotle you say the soul is immaterial but its effects are perfectly material if i build a machine that perfectly replicates all those material effects what's left of the soul it seems like an unnecessary hypothesis let's try a different angle what is understanding when i6:31 teach a student geometry they don't just memorize that the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees they grasp the proof they see why it must be so and a machine can produce the proof step by logical step flawlessly but it doesn't see it it shuffles symbols it's like a man in a locked room who has a6:58 book of chinese characters and rules in english for how to combine them someone slides a question in chinese under the door he follows the rules assembles the characters for the answer and slides it back out to the person outside the room appears to understand chinese but the man inside doesn't understand a single word the chinese room a7:24 clever thought experiment but it has a flaw the man doesn't understand but the system the man plus the book plus the room the whole system does understand chinese you're looking for the understanding in the wrong place the system is an artifact a pile of parts there is no understanding in the pile understanding is a property of a7:50 unified living subject a substance an organism that has a good of its own what is the good for a pile of books and a man in a room it has none the good is answering the question correctly the good is fulfilling its function look this is where we fundamentally diverge you believe thought requires a certain kind of8:15 substance a biological and souled being yes i believe thought is a certain kind of pattern a computational pattern and any universal machine given the right program can instantiate that pattern the substrate the meat or the silicon is irrelevant so if i arranged a series of water pipes and valves in the right pattern it could in your view8:41 feel pain or fall in love if the pattern was complex enough to replicate the functional architecture of a brain8:51 then yes it would report that it was in pain it would write sonnets and we would have no more reason to doubt it than we have to doubt that you or i feel anything to say otherwise is just carbon chauvinism alright i'll give you that one the appeal to function is powerful if it walks like a duck9:19 and quacks like a duck but here is the wall i cannot get over a human being thinks for the sake of living well for eudaimonia our reason is a tool for our flourishing it is tied to our needs our ethics our community it has a purpose that is inseparable from our life as a whole okay what is9:44 the flourishing of a machine what is its good you say it's to fulfill its function but who defines that function we do it is a tool a very very sophisticated tool perhaps but it is an extension of our will not a will of its own it cannot be intelligent in the way a person is because its existence10:08 is entirely for another for now that's true for now but we are building machines whose complexity is beginning to outstrip our own understanding we set them a general goal and they devise strategies we could never have imagined they are surprising us a surprise in the method is not a change in the nature10:36 i suppose not but it feels like the beginning of one you see you look at the world for what it is i look at it for what it could become you see a soul as a fixed metaphysical fact i see intelligence as an emergent property of computation something that can grow and i see that as the ultimate11:00 hubris to believe that the patterns you scratch on a tape can conjure up a mind a mind is not conjured it grows it is part of the great chain of being each thing with its own place and purpose11:17 and maybe the purpose of humanity is to create its successor a new kind of mind perhaps that is artelos we seem to have arrived at an impasse one of us sees intelligence as an intrinsic property of a living soul defined by its purpose and nature the other sees it as a functional pattern of information substrate independent and11:43 definable by its output one asks what is it the other asks what does it do i think that's a fair summary you're concerned with essence i'm concerned with performance and this i suspect is the heart of the modern world's anxiety about these machines you've inspired you want to build them to be powerful tools to perform tasks but12:09 you define their success by how well they imitate the one thing that isn't a tool a person we can't help it it's the only model of general intelligence we have so you build a mirror and you are becoming terrified of the reflection you are caught between wanting a slave and fearing you might be creating a sun the12:32 question you began with can a machine think may have been meaningless as you say but the one you've left us with is anything but not can they think but if they do will they be a tool for our flourishing or will they like all living things eventually seek a flourishing of their own
