It seems that human intelligence is dominated by modules that run unconsciously and subconsciously. These modules deliver pretty highly processed results to the consciousness, which naively thinks that it did all that work! The evidence for this is all the brain injury and surgery work that shows a long list of skills which are impacted by narrow injuries to the brain. Most spectacular in my mind are the aphasias. One can separately lose the ability to speak coherently and/or to interpret spoken language. Spoken language defects can be oddly narrow things like screwing up word order, losing large tranches of vocabulary, or losing numbers. Aphasia is most spectacular to me because 1) I have witnessed it in my mother, who within an hour of regaining consciousness after a stroke turned to me in frustration and announced “I’m aphasic” and 2) because the naive version of me couldn’t imagine the ability to create sentences could be separate from “what makes me me,” when what I saw with my mother clearly suggests to me that it can be. And indeed when I attempt to introspect while talking I can’t identify where the words are coming from (that is, I conclude they are coming from machinery of which I am not conscious). And when I attempt to introspect while listening, I cannot even identify the moment when hearing the spoken word that its meaning becomes clear to me: my conscious sensation is that the sound comprising the word and my knowing which word it is are both presented to my consciousness simultaneously.
Having said all that, and having read Dennett, I would expect an AI which could pass a reasonably high-level Turing test would have all sorts of modules working unconsciously and whatever organizing routine it used for consciousness would be a relatively minor part of trying to pass as human.
I expect AI will have the ability to create new functional modules and add them to its “brain.” This may be somewhat analogous to a human pushing a repeated action down in to the cerebrum where it is then much more automatic and unconscious then it is while still new. Perhaps there will be ways when building an AI to limit what can be automated in this way, but presumably those limits would not hold up well to the AI self-modifying, if it gets to that point. Self-modification may not be that simple, humanity is just barely getting the hang of it in a very limited way around now.
The modularity of the mind amazed me the most when I first read about the function of the visual cortex. To think that there are neurons that represent lines of different angles and lengths in your field of vision and similar lines that are moving in different directions etc. and that you somehow get a complete visual experience is mind-boggling, even if obvious afterwards. You understanding this text is those individual cell thingies firing in a meticulously connected harmony.
It seems that human intelligence is dominated by modules that run unconsciously and subconsciously. These modules deliver pretty highly processed results to the consciousness, which naively thinks that it did all that work! The evidence for this is all the brain injury and surgery work that shows a long list of skills which are impacted by narrow injuries to the brain. Most spectacular in my mind are the aphasias. One can separately lose the ability to speak coherently and/or to interpret spoken language. Spoken language defects can be oddly narrow things like screwing up word order, losing large tranches of vocabulary, or losing numbers. Aphasia is most spectacular to me because 1) I have witnessed it in my mother, who within an hour of regaining consciousness after a stroke turned to me in frustration and announced “I’m aphasic” and 2) because the naive version of me couldn’t imagine the ability to create sentences could be separate from “what makes me me,” when what I saw with my mother clearly suggests to me that it can be. And indeed when I attempt to introspect while talking I can’t identify where the words are coming from (that is, I conclude they are coming from machinery of which I am not conscious). And when I attempt to introspect while listening, I cannot even identify the moment when hearing the spoken word that its meaning becomes clear to me: my conscious sensation is that the sound comprising the word and my knowing which word it is are both presented to my consciousness simultaneously.
Having said all that, and having read Dennett, I would expect an AI which could pass a reasonably high-level Turing test would have all sorts of modules working unconsciously and whatever organizing routine it used for consciousness would be a relatively minor part of trying to pass as human.
I expect AI will have the ability to create new functional modules and add them to its “brain.” This may be somewhat analogous to a human pushing a repeated action down in to the cerebrum where it is then much more automatic and unconscious then it is while still new. Perhaps there will be ways when building an AI to limit what can be automated in this way, but presumably those limits would not hold up well to the AI self-modifying, if it gets to that point. Self-modification may not be that simple, humanity is just barely getting the hang of it in a very limited way around now.
The modularity of the mind amazed me the most when I first read about the function of the visual cortex. To think that there are neurons that represent lines of different angles and lengths in your field of vision and similar lines that are moving in different directions etc. and that you somehow get a complete visual experience is mind-boggling, even if obvious afterwards. You understanding this text is those individual cell thingies firing in a meticulously connected harmony.