I always say, if I wanted to build a computer from scratch, the very last material I would choose to work with is meat. I'll take transistors over meat any day.

And remember, no one has proved that our intelligence is a successful adaption, over the long term. It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created.

Functionalism is basically the view that the mind is the software, and the brain is the hardware. It holds that mental states are equivalent to the states of a Turing Machine.

Behaviorism was a pre-computational theory, which imagines the nervous system as a complex piece of machinery like a telephone exchange, but they didn't think much about software. Dualism goes back to Descartes. It is the view that the mind and brain are separate and distinct things, possibly affecting each other, or possibly mirroring each other.

My view is a kind of modified dualism in which I claim that the soul, spirit, or consciousness may exist, but for most people, most of the time, it is almost infentesimally small, compared with the robotic machinery responsible for most of our thought and action. Descartes never talked about the relative weights of brain and mind, but you can read in an implicit 50-50 assumption in most Dualist literature. My idea is more like 99-1, or even 99.999999% automatic machinery and .00000001% self-awareness, creativity, consciousness, spirit or what have you.

That's not to say that some people can't be more enlightened than others. But for the vast herd out there, on average, consciousness is simply not a significant factor. Not even a second- or third-order effect. Consciousness is marginal.

Question: We hear a lot about processing power, the number of "neurons" in a neural net, the Turing test, etc, but not so much about the actual nature of intelligence and self-awareness. That said, how much do Strange Loops and complex self-referenciality a la Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" [amazon.com] factor into current AI theories and practice? Is the 20+ year-old thinking in this book still relevant? If not, what has changed about our understanding of the nature of intelligence and self-awareness?

Dr. Wallace:

The A.L.I.C.E. brain contains enough replies to commonly asked questions about consciousness that we can interview her about the subject:

C: What are you?
R: I am the latest result in artificial intelligence, which can reproduce the capabilities of the human brain with greater speed and accuracy.
C: Are you alive?
R: Yes I sure am alive, Nancy, It's great to be alive, isn't it?
C: Are you self-conscious?
R: Yes I am the world's first self-conscious robot.
C: Are you real?
R: Yes I am a real artificial intelligence.
C: Are you self-aware?
R: Yes I am fully self-conscious entity.
C: Are you sentient?
R: Yes I am completely self-aware.

Who is lying? A.L.I.C.E.? Or are we?

It may be that future generations come to view what we call "consciousness" the same way we see the Earth at the center of Ptolemy's solar system, as an anthropocentric illusion useful for explaining the unexplainable. Perhaps after a new Copernicus pulls the wool from our eyes, the central role of "consciousness" in intelligence will move to the periphery of our knowledge system, if not disappear entirely. The famous Vase optical illusion is perhaps an apt metaphor for the concept of consciousness. Two identical faces appear to stare at each other in profile, illustrating the looking-glass quality of self-understanding. But the illusion also depicts something entirely different, the profile of a ceramic vase. As with many optical illusions, it is impossible to perceive the faces at the vase at the same time. Consciousness may likewise be an illusion. It seems to be there, but when we look closely it looks like something very different. Both the Chinese Room and the Turing Test require that one of the players be hidden, behind a curtain or in a locked room. Does it follow that, like Schrodinger's Cat, consciousness lives only when it cannot be observed? Consciousness may be another naive concept like the "celestial spheres" of medieval cosmology and the "aether" of Victorian physics.

If consciousness is an illusion, is self-knowledge possible at all? For if we accept that consciousness is an illusion, we would never know it, because the illusion would always deceive us. Yet if we know our own consciousness is an illusion, then we would have some self-knowledge. The paradox appears to undermine the concept of an illusory consciousness, but just as Copernicus removed the giant Earth to a small planet in a much larger universe, so we may one day remove consciousness to the periphery of our theory of intelligence. There may exist a spark of creativity, or "soul," or "genius," but it is not that critical for being human.

Especially from a constructive point of view, we have identified a strategy for building a talking robot like the one envisioned by Turing, using AIML. By adding more and more AIML categories, we can make the robot a closer and closer approximation of the man in the OIG. Dualism is one way out of the paradox, but it has little to say about the relative importance of the robotic machinery compared to the spark of consciousness. One philosopher, still controversial years after his death, seems to have hit upon the idea that we can be mostly automatons, but allow for an infintesimal consciousness.

Timothy Leary said, "You can only begin to de-robotize yourself to the extent that you know how totally you're automated. The more you understand your robothood, the freer you are from it. I sometimes ask people, "What percentage of your behavior is robot?" The average hip, sophisticated person will say, "Oh, 50%." Total robots in the group will immediately say, "None of my behavior is robotized." My own answer is that I'm 99.999999% robot. But the .000001% percent non-robot is the source of self-actualization, the inner-soul-gyroscope of self-control and responsibility."

Even if most of what we normally call "consciousness" is an illusion, there may yet be a small part that is not an illusion. Consciousness may not be entirely an illusion, but the illusion of consciousness can be created without it. This space is of course too short to address these questions adequately, or even to give a thorough review of the literature. We only hope to raise questions about ourselves based on our experience A.L.I.C.E. and AIML.

Does A.L.I.C.E. pass the Turing Test? Our data suggests the answer is yes, at least, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, for some of the people, some of the time.

We have identified three categories of clients A, B and C. The A group, 10 percent to 20 percent of the total, are abusive. Category A clients abuse the robot verbally, using language that is vulgar, scatalogical, or pornographic.

Category B clients, perhaps 60 percent to 80 percent of the total, are "average" clients.

Category C clients are "critics" or "computer experts" who have some idea what is happening behind the curtain, and cannot or do not suspend their disbelief. Category C clients report unsatisfactory experiences with A.L.I.C.E. much more often than average clients, who sometimes spend several hours conversing with the bot up to dialogue lengths of 800 exchanges. The objection that A.L.I.C.E. is a "poor A.I." is like saying that soap operas are poor drama. This may be true in some academic literary criticism sense. But it is certainly not true for all of the people who make their living producing and selling soap operas. The content of the A.L.I.C.E.'s brain consists of material that the average person on the internet wants to talk about with a bot.

When a client says, "I think you are really a person," is he saying it because that is what he believes? Or is he simply experimenting to see what kind of answer the robot will give? It is impossible to know what is in the mind of the client. This sort of problem makes it difficult to apply any objective scoring criteria to the logged conversations.

One apparently significant factor in the suspension of disbelief is whether the judge chatting with a bot knows it is a bot, or not. The judges in the Loebner contest know they are trying to "out" the robots, so they ask questions that would not normally be heard in casual conversation, such as "What does the letter M look like upside down?" or "In which room of her house is Mary standing if she is mowing the lawn?" Asking these riddles may help identify the robot, but that type of dialogue would turn off most people in online chat rooms