More on Robot Love
Am I right? Consider this: would you enjoy watching a TV show in which contestants competed to solve complicated math equations as quickly as possible? Now, would you be excited to see a computer compete against the humans in this contest? I didn’t think so.
Yes, computers can crunch numbers. In fact, in essence, that’s all they do. The natural language used for the questions in Jeopardy are broken down by the computer into bits and bytes and then processed. Very quickly.
From the computer’s point of view, all of the questions are nothing more than math equations to be solved with speed.
It’s a Binary World
Now this one really bugs me: “KG Blankinship” writes in a letter to the New York Times that “of course we can build machines that exhibit purely random behavior by exploiting quantum mechanics as well”.
But before that he says something even more absurd: “Self-awareness and the ability to adapt creatively can also be programmed into a computer”. The statement is self-contradictory but he hits on a truth: “can be programmed” into a computer. Next, he’ll tell us that a computer can program itself. As if the program that told it to program itself could ever be something that was not, no matter how many steps down the chain, the product of human intervention.
Can a computer’s behavior ever be truly “random”? Or is the appearance of randomness merely the irreducible fact that the human’s have hidden the schedule for the behavior from humans by employing elaborate and obtuse mathematical formulae? Yes, always. And it’s always ultimately math. And the computer is always ultimately binary, which means it can never not be math. And if someone jumps up and shouts “yeah, but sooner or later they will find a way to integrate organic cells…” I say that on that day the organic cells will be self-aware or random, not the computer.
Why does it matter? Because sooner or later someone is going to tell someone else that something is true or must be done and can’t be contradicted because a computer said it was true or must be done. No, the programmer said it was true or must be done. The computer is only doing what it can only do: parrot the input of it’s master.
It occurs to me that some of the people defending the idea that computers can “think” like humans operate under the assumption that the human brain is binary in function, that is, that neurons are all either on or off, with no meaningful in-between state. (I suppose you could also argue that a very, very large number of computer chips could attain a level of virtual analog operation, where there are so many simulated “in-between” states that is operates like a human brain.)
It’s an intriguing line of thought. I don’t believe the human brain is binary in that sense. I believe that human beings are an integrated system in which any particular state of virtually any part of the body has an infinite range of values, which, combined with every other part of the body having an infinite range of values, produces an organism that can never be matched by any device that is, by definition, at its fundamental level, always binary.
To believe that human brains are also binary is to impose a reductionist view of biology onto an organism. You can only believe it if you choose to see only the binary functions of the organism, and ignoring the organic non-binary aspects of the brain.