Machines, Intelligence, and Problem of Motivation

I had the luxury recently of re-reading the paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which Alan Turing first poses what has come to be known as the Turing Test. In short, he suggests that, if a machine can communicate sufficiently well that a person could not identify it as a machine, then that machine may as well be considered intelligent.

Of course, you can't read this paper without also reading "Minds, Brain, and Programs", where John Searle establishes that Chinese Room thought experiment. In effect, Searle describes how syntactic manipulation without any awareness of semantic content (effectively all any computer obeying a program is capable of) eliminates the potential for understanding. Thus, he claims that no digital computer could ever be considered intelligent.

These are points that have been debated to death. It want to take a second to focus on a point made by each thinker that I haven't seen discussed as widely.

First, Turing describes how a machine such as could pass his test might "evolve" its own intelligence. He suggests that we could create a program that effectively mimics the learning mechanisms of the brain (neural nets of a sort) and then train it through carrot and stick to respond appropriately. This, he thinks, sidesteps the question of a computer simply running a normal man-made algorithm.

Searle, for his part, claims that the separability of hardware and software prevents this from really being the case. Mental states and mental representations, he says, are at least partly the consequence of normal brain function. They are not something that the brain simply executes.

I really think that Searle is right in this instance, and I think it comes down to biology and necessity. Suppose that we could perfectly recreate the brain's ability to learn: to acquire language and to exhibit intentional, causal attitudes in interaction with the world around us. For what reason would a computer utilize these mechanisms?

Intelligent beings use our brains and our ability to create mental representations and constructs out of necessity for survival. It is the natural order of all organisms to grow, decay, consume, and excrete (and, ideally, multiply at some point). In order to do so, we need to interact with the world around us. When you're an infant, your choice (conscious or not) is clear: cry or die. As we age, we develop more elaborate and more efficient ways of getting what we need from the environment, utilizing our cognitive abilities to do so.

A machine has exactly what needs? Electricity? It certainly doesn't have a biological impetus for reproduction. A truly intelligent machine, then, would have no reason to communicate or engage in any sort of causal behavior. It would simply want to stay plugged in. Any motivation that a computer would have (the punishment and reward suggested by Turing) would have no intrinsic value to its survival. It would be wholly arbitrary and entirely external.

Does this mean that a machine *couldn't* be intelligent? No. But it does have consequences for what intelligence means. If we ever describe machines as intelligent, it means that we would need to accept that mental representations and language need to serve some purpose beyond the evolutionary. You cannot claim that we can create "life" in this way without admitting the possibility of our own created-ness.

Obviously, as a Christian, I have no problem with this (even if I disagree with the idea of machine intelligence), but it's a dilemma that I highly doubt many computer scientists ever consider.