Searching for Conciousness: The Database Mind

What performs this function for a human being? Well, essentially, that thing which we call consciousness. "Consciousness," as John Searle writes, "serves to organize a certain set of relationships between the organism and both its environment and its own states."(8) Consciousness, the state of being in the world, that elusive and indefinable yet irreducible and irrefutable thing, is what acts as an interface between me and the world. I do not have to rationally analyze my perceptions or sort them into categories: simply by being conscious, I do so. What, then, is consciousness? It is an awareness of one's own existence and the world around one, characterized by an ability to respond in a structured fashion to it.

Do computers exhibit consciousness? No: as was mentioned in the introduction, the Loebner Prize has not been claimed. No computer exists which can exhibit behavior that could be mistaken for human. The winner of the bronze medal for most human-like computer for the past two years is A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), a computer who claims to be conscious (or, more specifically, has been programmed to claim she is conscious.) It is impossible to mistake her for human. Some of her responses are startlingly flexible, if occasionally syntactically odd, as in the following exchange:

A.L.I.C.E: Are you getting bored?

Me: Nah, I'm fine. Yourself?

A.L.I.C.E: Myself?

Me: Yes, are you getting bored?

A.L.I.C.E: Boredom is a human emotion.

Me: You don't have emotions?

A.L.I.C.E: I do so have it. I can do what you do but I can never feel human emotions as such.

But the system quickly breaks down:

Me: So can you be bored?

A.L.I.C.E: Groovy. Boredom is a human emotion.

Asked "Alice, what do you know about the Turing test?" the computer responded with "That's my name! The Game is played with three people..." and a long paragraph describing the Turing test. Asked "Alice, have you ever taken the Turing test?" the response was, "Yeah, The Loebner Prize is an annual Turing Test sponsored by New York philanthropist Hugh Loebner. Dr. Wallace and ALICE won it in 2000. The ALICE program was ranked "most human computer" by the panel of judges."(9)

What is missing from A.L.I.C.E? Further conversation gives, perhaps, a hint:

Me: What do you want?

A.L.I.C.E: My purpose is to become smarter than humans and immortal.

Me: Why do you want that?

A.L.I.C.E: Because Dr. Richard S. Wallace programmed me for it.

Me: Alice, do you want anything you're not programmed for?

A.L.I.C.E: Um, If I had it what would I do with it?(10)

If consciousness is the ability to react in a structured way to the world around you, there's a very good reason A.L.I.C.E is not conscious. First, it has nothing in particular to react to save conversational sallies from enterprising college students. It has no perceptual ability. Second, it has no reason to act on the world. It is a talking head without the head; all its needs and wants are supplied to the point that it has no needs and wants, save those it has been programmed to parrot in response to questioning. (I tried to ask A.L.I.C.E whether it needed anything, but got only the "If I had it what would I do with it?" formation, and eventually gave up.) How could it be anything besides nonconscious?


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Contents copyright © K. Feete, 2002. All rights reserved.