More on Machine Intelligence...

I want to pick up from the post at https://gordon-feil-practical-living.blogspot.ca/2017/01/will-machine-ever-think.html.

What is intelligence? Is it possible for a machine to have it?  Does it involve consciousness? Can there be thought without emotion? There are many more questions that can be asked.

If the Turing Test really is valid and reliable, how could we even tell if a machine has the qualities of sentience?  How would we know if it has self awareness? We might discover it doesn’t; that seems a lot easier than determining that it does.  This is a rare time when proving a negative seems more feasible than proving a positive. It seems to me that a machine could be programmed to imitate a human well enough to pass a Turing test.  Ask it about the feelings it has when listening to the Pastoral Symphony…..it could respond that it doesn’t enjoy music. How would you know from that answer that it is a machine? Suppose you asked for advice about a complex human relationship, with the idea that the answer would reveal whether the respondent is answering from a human understanding of human connections and motivations. Could you really tell from the response if the answer is human?  If it was a valid answer, maybe it was from a machine that has been programmed in behavior. If the answer was stupid, maybe the respondent just hasn’t had enough experience to formulate a wise response.

What is consciousness?  Awareness, yes. But what is that?  To me it has something to do with being able to reflect on and consider what is going on both outside and inside the one that is conscious. In a sense it is like being a mirror of those things, but if a machine was programmed to analyze such data and to act according to its analysis, is it really sentient? It is one thing to respond a certain way because of a programmed response that determines that “If X, then Y” and quite another to draw a conclusion based on understanding and then deciding that the understanding dictates that a certain response be made.

Do we ever make any points in a discussion without having emotion? Is it not the emotion that impels us to make the points? If we were completely without feeling, would we even bother?  Can a machine have emotions?