According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

The Turing Test is one of the most disputed topics in artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper is a review of the past 50 years of the Turing Test. Philosophical debates, practical developments and repercussions in related disciplines are all covered. We discuss Turing's ideas in detail and present the important comments that have been made on them. Within this context, behaviorism, consciousness, the 'other minds' problem, and similar topics in philosophy of mind are discussed. We (...) also cover the sociological and psychological aspects of the Turing Test. Finally, we look at the current situation and analyze programs that have been developed with the aim of passing the Turing Test. We conclude that the Turing Test has been, and will continue to be, an influential and controversial topic. -/- (This paper was reprinted in: The Turing Test: The Elusive Standard of Artificial Intelligence, J. H. Moor, ed., Kluwer Academic, pp. 23-78, 2003.). (shrink)

This quote/commented critique of Turing's classical paper suggests that Turing meant -- or should have meant -- the robotic version of the Turing Test (and not just the email version). Moreover, any dynamic system (that we design and understand) can be a candidate, not just a computational one. Turing also dismisses the other-minds problem and the mind/body problem too quickly. They are at the heart of both the problem he is addressing and the solution he is proposing.

Turing's celebrated 1950 paper proposes a very general methodological criterion for modelling mental function: total functional equivalence and indistinguishability. His criterion gives rise to a hierarchy of Turing Tests, from subtotal ("toy") fragments of our functions (t1), to total symbolic (pen-pal) function (T2 -- the standard Turing Test), to total external sensorimotor (robotic) function (T3), to total internal microfunction (T4), to total indistinguishability in every empirically discernible respect (T5). This is a "reverse-engineering" hierarchy of (decreasing) empirical underdetermination of the theory (...) by the data. Level t1 is clearly too underdetermined, T2 is vulnerable to a counterexample (Searle's Chinese Room Argument), and T4 and T5 are arbitrarily overdetermined. Hence T3 is the appropriate target level for cognitive science. When it is reached, however, there will still remain more unanswerable questions than when Physics reaches its Grand Unified Theory of Everything (GUTE), because of the mind/body problem and the other-minds problem, both of which are inherent in this empirical domain, even though Turing hardly mentions them. (shrink)

Some practical criteria for free-will are suggested where free-will is a matter of degree. It is argued that these are more appropriate than some extremely idealised conceptions. Thus although the paper takes lessons from philosophy it avoids idealistic approaches as irrelevant. A mechanism for allowing an agent to meet these criteria is suggested: that of facilitating the gradual emergence of free-will in the brain via an internal evolutionary process. This meets the requirement that not only must the choice of action (...) be free but also choice in the method of choice, and choice in the method of choice of the method of choice etc. This is directly analogous to the emergence of life from non-life. Such an emergence of indeterminism with respect to the conditions of the agent fits well with the `Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis' which posits that our intelligence evolved (at least partially) to enable us to deal with social complexity and modelling `arms races'. There is a clear evolutionary advantage in being internally coherent in seeking to fulfil ones goals and unpredictable by ones peers. To fully achieve this vision several other aspects of cognition are necessary: open-ended strategy development; the meta-evolution of the evolutionary process; the facility to anticipate the results of strategies; and the situating of this process in a society of competitive peers. Finally the requirement that reports of the deliberations that lead to actions need to be socially acceptable leads to the suggestion that the language that the strategies are developed within be subject to a normative process in parallel with the development of free-will. An appendix outlines a philosophical position in support of my position. (shrink)

A robot that is functionally indistinguishable from us may or may not be a mindless Zombie. There will never be any way to know, yet its functional principles will be as close as we can ever get to explaining the mind.

I draw attention to an ambiguity of the expression ‘phenomenal consciousness’ that is an avoidable yet persistent source of conceptual confusion among consciousness scientists. The ambiguity is between what I call phenomenality and what I call conscious states, where the former denotes an abstract property and the latter denotes a phenomenon or class of its instances. Since sentences featuring these two terms have different semantic properties, it is possible to equivocate over the term ‘consciousness’. It is also possible to fail (...) to distinguish between statements that are true about conscious states in virtue of their phenomenality, and statements that are true in virtue of other properties of conscious states. I review empirically informed arguments by scientists Bernard Balleine and Anthony Dickinson, Stevan Harnad, and Jeffrey Alan Gray, arguing that each of them makes errors based on the ambiguity. I conclude with some tentative suggestions for avoiding further confusion about the ambiguity. (shrink)