Just to let interested persons know. I have written to Mr. Ruiz asking whether he would like to have answers to his questionnaire sent to his email or posted here. I will let you know what his response is when I receive it.
I do apologise. Apparently I transposed the ‘i’ and the ‘u’ in Lenin Ruiz’s email address. The correct address is giudesca@hotmail.com. I have corrected it below, as well, where it was completely wrong! Accordingly, I apologise to you all for my mistake, especially to Lenin Ruiz. And thanks to Veronica Abbass at the Canadian Atheist for setting me right!
For the last few days I have been dealing with medical issues, something that becomes more common as I grow older. However, I am back, and I want to start by introducing you to Lenin Ruiz, an atheist and a student in anthropology at the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, Quito, Ecuador. He has a questionnaire that he asked me to respond to, and asked me to send it to one other person. I asked if he would consent to have the questionnaire placed on choiceindying.com, and he was only too happy to accede to this proposal. So I am putting up the questionnaire here. Those who understand and write Spanish may answer in Spanish, since Lenin has no English, and we have been corresponding via Google Translate (a very good exemplification of Searle’s “Chinese Room” Gedankenexperiment, by the way, which suggests to me that Searle’s argument against strong AI may in fact be sound). You can send your responses to Señor Ruiz at the following address: giudesca@hotmail.com. I have checked out Señor Ruiz’s bona fides and he has sent me approval for his project, entitled:
Universos discursivos y personalidad en el ateismo, breve estudio transdisciplinario
which translates, roughly, according to Google Translate (with some redaction):
Discursive universes and personality in atheism: a brief interdisciplinary study
I have uploaded Señor Ruiz’s documentation of the University approval of his project here. The questionnaire follows:
LIST OF QUESTIONS
♦♦♦
- How deep is religious influence on your family?
- When did you begin to feel that religious ideas and actions did not satisfy you?
- Did you have militancy or read Marxist books as a teenager?
- (Answer only if your answer to question 3 was “yes”) How influential was the left-wing thought in your formation as an atheist?
- Have people made fun of you or rejected you due to being an atheist?
- What do you think of “believers”?
- Have you made fun of any believer or tried to be sarcastic to annoy a “believer”?
- Has there been any strong emotionally happening that has made you doubt of your beliefs as an atheist?
- How do socialize in your job, with your family, with “believers”?
- How do you value that you belong to a minority of people in the world. Don’t you think that you are wrong and “believers” are right?
- Have you had any contact with masonry or Satanism?
- Which do you think is the fundamental difference between an atheist and a “believer”?
- Tell me 3 values a human being must always have.
- Tell me 3 anti-values a human being must avoid.
- Do you think an atheist is born or becomes?
- What’s your opinion about people who stopped being atheists and became “believers” for any reason?
- What’s your opinion about death?
- Is there life beyond death?
- Actually, what terrorizes us about the physical extinction…perhaps is the fact that agony can involve physical pain and suffering. What is your opinion?
- Do we have a soul?
Some of the questions appear to be a bit loaded. But never mind, I completed them and sent them off. I got back:
A message that you sent to the following recipient could not be delivered due to a permanent error. ** The remote server 65.55.92.152 responded with: ** guidesca@hotmail.com 550:Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable This message was created automatically by mail delivery software on the server avasout03.
What a weird juxtaposition — masonry and Satanism. I suspect this is a Catholic thing, equating the two somehow.
My dad’s a Mason. So was my uncle. It’s a benign group of old guys that get together to play-act once a week, and then do community fund-raisers.
All Shiners are Masons (but not all Masons are Shriners) — and no one has ever suggested that Shriners’ Hospitals are somehow associated with a supernatural evil. They’re places where really, really sick kids can get the best medical care, no questions asked and without regard to family finances.
BTW and for the record.
1. Not very.
2. Age 8. Right after I figured out Santa Claus wasn’t real.
3. No. (Again, very weird question to an American). Just the opposite, in fact.
4. N/A.
5. No.
6. They display abnormal amounts of credulity in the absence of confirmatory evidence.
7. You betcha. That’s what YouTube is for. (And the gone-and-almost-forgotten troll who used to lurk around here — AH, I remember — Bob Wheeler.)
8. Nope.
9. Same way I associate with non-believers. (Another kinda dopey question, IMHO.)
10. What? Of course not. I have come to the only logical conclusion — I’m right. But argumentum ab populum isn’t a very effective way to come to a conclusion about anything.
11. My dad’s a Mason.
12. Atheists lack a belief in any deity. Believers believe in one or more deities. That’s it. Any other answer is — well — bullshit.
13. Intellectual integrity. That’s the only one I can think of that’s unconditional.
14. Bigotry. Privilege. Tribalism.
15. Doesn’t matter. But most often “becomes” due to the heavy influence of religion on society.
16. They’re engaging in wishful/magical thinking of some sort. In other words, they’ve lost their intellectual integrity.
17. That it pretty much sucks. But there’s not thing one anyone can do about it.
18. No.
19. First, I’m not “terrorized” by the thought of physical extinction. Second, post-death “agony” is not possible. When you die, you decompose. Your brain does, too. And there is nothing about your conscious mind that survives. Substance dualism is scientifically impossible.
20. Not possible, and in fact is disproven by science (souls violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics).
For an atheist, he’s got a whole lot of theistic-sounding questions.
I tried sending my answers to the address listed but it bounced. (“mailbox unavailable”)
Sorry about that, folks, I don’t know why Lenin Ruiz would have blocked is email address. I will ask and get back. This comes as a bit of a surprise.
I am, aware, however, that some of the questions seem, on the face of it, a bit odd. However, we have to let the man set up his enquiry as he chooses, I guesss, and it is couched, more or less, in culturally relevant ways. The university itself is, I believe, a Catholic one, but Lenin Ruiz speaks of himself as an atheist, and having been in contact with 10 other atheists in Ecuador! It is clearly not a socially accepted designation, which is why I thought he might benefit from wider exposure.
How deep is religious influence on your family?
My father’s side is nominally Catholic, my mother’s side is nonreligious. I did not have a religious upbringing.
When did you begin to feel that religious ideas and actions did not satisfy you?
I have never been religious. In the last 5 years, or so, though, I have become disappointed with the bigotry and stupidity of religious fanatics, and this has led me to a more vocal atheism.
Did you have militancy or read Marxist books as a teenager?
I don’t know about ‘militancy,’ but I read, and disagreed with, Marx and Engels, yes.
(Answer only if your answer to question 3 was “yes”) How influential was the left-wing thought in your formation as an atheist?
If by “left-wing” you mean “socialist,” not at all. However, the authors who were influential in my Atheism- Spinoza, Epicurus, Mill- were generally politically left-leaning.
Have people made fun of you or rejected you due to being an atheist?
‘made fun of,’ yes; ‘rejected,’ no.
What do you think of “believers”?
Many are fine and serious people who happen to be wrong. Many others are less good.
Have you made fun of any believer or tried to be sarcastic to annoy a “believer”?
Of course. I also make fun of nonbelievers sarcastically.
Has there been any strong emotionally happening that has made you doubt of your beliefs as an atheist?
No. Whether or not there exists a god or gods is not dependent on my emotional state.
How do socialize in your job, with your family, with “believers”?
Much the same with believers and nonbelievers. Religion does not often come up.
How do you value that you belong to a minority of people in the world. Don’t you think that you are wrong and “believers” are right?
Well, the believers all disagree with one another. They can’t possibly all be right. In any case, the truth is not dependent on who is in the majority.
Have you had any contact with masonry or Satanism?
No (assuming you mean Freemasonry)
Which do you think is the fundamental difference between an atheist and a “believer”?
Atheists do not believe in God or gods. Believers do. (There are some atheistic religions, such as Zen, that blur the distinction a bit.)
Tell me 3 values a human being must always have.
Integrity, Compassion, Rationality
Tell me 3 anti-values a human being must avoid.
Irrationality, Blindness to the needs of others, Hypocrisy
Do you think an atheist is born or becomes?
One’s tempted to say ‘yes.’ I imagine it depends on the person in question.
What’s your opinion about people who stopped being atheists and became “believers” for any reason?
They’re probably wrong, but without knowing their individual reasons it’s hard to be more specific than that.
What’s your opinion about death?
It’s unpleasant, but pretty much inevitable. And better than the alternative, living forever.
Is there life beyond death?
No.
Actually, what terrorizes us about the physical extinction…perhaps is the fact that agony can involve physical pain and suffering. What is your opinion?
Parting with loved ones, pain, not finishing things we wanted to finish.
Do we have a soul?
No.
I received the same request from Lenin Ruiz. The correct email address for Lenin is giudesca@hotmail.com.
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This may not be the place to argue about this, but I don’t think this is quite true. There’s nothing here passing the Turing test — in this case you are two people conversing via computer translator, but in the “Chinese Room” scenario, the room itself (and the program whoever is in the room executes) is one of the persons in the conversation.
Translating from one language to another (especially between languages with similar syntax) is many orders of magnitude less difficult than creating fluent and appropriate conversation from scratch in one of those languages.
Another Matt. Perhaps this isn’t the place to discuss it, and perhaps it doesn’t fulfil all the requirements of Searle’s original thought experiment, but the point is still that manipulating symbols without corresponding understanding is similar enough to the Chinese room to make the point that something is missing, which was Searle’s point. Obviously, Google Translate wouldn’t pass the Turing test; but even if it could, there would still be something missing, namely a conscious understanding of the words being sent to someone else. My computer, in this case, might be seen as the other person in the dialogue, and it quite clearly does not possess this understanding. My point still is that this is a fair analogy of the original intent of the Chinese Room Gedankenexperiment.
Let me know if I’m writing in an inappropriate place here.
I don’t think your computer can reasonably be seen as the other person in the dialogue, because it is not (nor is the google server) what is generating the content of the responses. Again, there’s a huge difference between manipulating symbols to the extent required to translate between languages — only some “understanding” of the semantic content is required. To put this into the terms of Searle’s Chinese Room, imagine the room with two inputs on opposite sides. Person A inputs something in Japanese in input A; the person in the room — who only speaks English — runs a program manually to convert the Japanese symbols into Chinese, and puts the resulting Chinese writing in output B, where it is read by person B… and then person B’s reply goes to person A in the same manner. This isn’t too hard — we see clearly that both members of the dialog have an understanding of what they are writing.
What Searle has in mind in the original, though, is much different. In that one, a Chinese speaker writes his part of the dialog, submits it to the room. The person in the room manually runs a program which spits out a reply that is indistinguishable from an appropriate reply made by a human — let’s say a 15-year-old Chinese girl who observes Chinese customs but has a wit about her (OK, it doesn’t have to be that specific, but the room’s “program” has to have a personality inferable from its writing in order to pass the Turing test). This means that not only is the room just converting language into language, but it is actually generating one half of the dialog, with access to all the knowledge and mannerisms one would expect a Chinese-speaking human to possess. The room would have to “know” (pardon the scare quotes) that it’s usually unpleasant to walk several miles in the rain, “understand” hunger and have an opinion on whether it’s ethical to eat animals, would “understand” and be able to generate jokes and double entendres and “know” when doing so was appropriate; it would have food, literature, and music preferences, and would recall gifts given and received and have anecdotes about them. If you think about what is going on with the room, it’s much harder to assert that it has no understanding when it’s carrying on a complex conversation like this.
On the other hand, if the room’s program were stored on paper it would take up more space than a huge library, and the room’s interlocutor and operator would both die before the room would have a chance to generate its first reply! I think the bigger question is really “is it possible for a non-biological entity to pass the Turing test?” Searle has set himself up badly by already stipulating that it is, as though it were no big deal.
Best,
Matt
Matt, I think you misunderstand my point. I wasn’t trying to oversimplify. Indeed, I was saying very much what you say in your last paragraph. The point still is that all that is going on in the room is the manipulation of symbols. And it is, after all, a thought experiment. It doesn’t have to be possible to do this. All we have to do is to imagine it happening. Suppose that we could program a computer to do the manipulating for the person in the room. All we would need is inputs, and the occupant would then turn around and issue the outputs in the way that Searle describes. And we are assuming that it does in fact, in this respect, pass the Turing Test. Even if that were so, would we want to say, of the room, that it understands?
After all, in the thought experiment, the occupant of the room has a very complicated system of returning certain symbols in response to other symbols, so that it looks as though he “understands” Chinese. Why should this system of symbol manipulation not be computerised? But if we turn this task over to a computer, supposing, again, that this kind of complexity is possible, are we still willing to say that the computer really does understand? Is the Turing Test really a reliable test of what Searle calls strong AI? You don’t need to pardon the square quotes, because I think we would still want to say no, and the main reason is that for all the signs of understanding that are returned by the computerised room, still more is required to speak of intelligence at all, and this is intentionality. Functionalism simply doesn’t cut it.
Obviously, I haven’t read all the very rich literature around the Chinese Room thought experiment, and probably never will. But it seems to me that Dennett’s way of dealing with Zombies won’t do. A lot of the discussion is hampered by the assumption that we can work through the thought experiment, and that the thought experiment itself makes sense. Suppose that there were a Zombie which has all the computing power of the supposed Chinese Room, and yet which walks around and is more or less indistinguishable from a human being. Dennett supposes that we could not tell the difference between that and a human being, so we should think about the Zombie as one of us — which we probably would, if we did not know that the Zombie was a very clever artifact. But if we did know that it was an artifact, and knew its specs, and could predict exactly what it would do, based on those specs, then we would be less likely to take its cries of pain as real cries of pain, although it would be hard to do.
This is precisely what is wrong with William Lane Craig’s argument that animals do not feel pain. Of course they do. How do we know? Because they are, in certain respects which we can examine, exactly like us, and have nervous systems, and brains and other indicators of sentience. Dennett, I think, is very much like BF Skinner, and he is wrong for very much the same reason, because we are not functional systems, but living organisms, and there really is a mysterious aspect of living organisms which Tom Nagel puts in terms of “what it is like” to be something.
I know for certain that I could not do it. And I would take it pretty seriously if it, for instance, read Faulkner or listened to Stravinsky and had insightful things to say.
Or, why not imagine Hitchens, or Dennett himself as such a zombie or “clever artifact.” All the impassioned oratory and writing from the one, and all the incisive prose from the other, created by beings who (or do I beg the question by using “who”?) — who are missing a little mysterious something that would make us believe they were sentient if they had it. I think it’s really easy to imagine that an android will never be able to act just like Hitchens, or even could not in principle, but I find it impossible to imagine an android acting just like Hitchens but failing to convince us it was conscious or that there was something it was like to be such an android.
Of course, Matt, that is true. I can’t even help but personalise my GPS voice! That shows how suggestible we are. But the difficulty of thinking of an artifact which in fact behaves in a human way is not a reason for supposing that nothing is missing in an artifact that is a mechanism, programmed to act in a certain way. Descartes showed that you could think of animals in that way, and treat them accordingly. He was wrong, as it happens, but it seems to me that it is possible in a thought experiment to think of an android which does not have phenomenological experiences which could still give us the impression of being fully sentient, and however convincing, if we knew, because its designer knew, that it was not sentient, and knew precisely the source of the artifact’s apparent sentience, we would still feel that something essential was missing.
Right… but I think the point is there’s no reason to impute any more than “apparent sentience” to other people on the same basis, except we notice they are made of the similar meat and bones and brains we ourselves are. To me, the only “something essential” missing would be the mystery — we would say the same thing if we knew precisely the source of our own or other people’s apparent sentience.
This will be my last post in the thread. Thanks as always for the interaction.