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  3. Unlike any other scientific topics, consciousness—the first-person awareness of the world around—is truly in the eye of beholder

Unlike any other scientific topics, consciousness—the first-person awareness of the world around—is truly in the eye of beholder

admin2010-05-25  12
问题       Unlike any other scientific topics, consciousness—the first-person awareness of the world around—is truly in the eye of beholder. I know I am conscious. But how do I know that you are?
     Through logical analogy—I am a conscious human being, and therefore you as a human being are also likely to be conscious—I conclude I am probably not the only conscious being in a world of biological puppets. Extend it to other creatures, and uncertainty grows. Is a dog conscious? An elm? A rock?
     "We don’t have the mythical consciousness meter," said Dr. Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. "All we have directly to go on is behavior." So without even an elementary understanding of what consciousness is, the idea of instilling it into a machine—or understanding how a machine might evolve consciousness—becomes almost unfathomable.
     The field of artificial intelligence started out with dreams of making thinking or conscious machines, but to debate, its achievements have been modest. The field has evolved to focus more on solving practical problems like complex scheduling tasks than on imitating human behavior.
     But many believe that the original goals of artificial intelligence will be attainable within a few decades.
     Some people, like Dr. Hans Moravec, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, believe a human being is nothing more than a fancy machine, and that it will be possible to build a machine with the same features, that there is nothing magical about the brain and biological flesh. "I’m confident we can build robot with behavior that is just as rich as human being behavior," he said. "You could quiz it as much as you like about its internal mental life, and it would answer as any human being." To Dr. Moravec, if it acts consciously, it is conscious. To ask more is pointless.
     Dr. Chalmers, regards consciousness as an unutterable trait, and it may be useless to try to pin it down. "We’ve got to admit something here is irreducible," he said. "Some primitive precursor consciousness could go all the way down" to the smallest, most primitive organisms, he said. Dr. Chalmers too sees nothing fundamentally different between a creature of flesh and blood and one of metal, plastics and electronic circuits. "I’m quite open to the idea that machines might eventually become conscious," he said, adding that it would be "equally weird". And if a person gets into involved conversations with a robot about everything from Kant to baseball, "We’ll be as practically certain they are conscious as other people," he said. "Of course, that doesn’t resolve the theoretical question".
     But others say machines, regardless of how complex, will never match people.
     The arguments can become mysterious. In his book Shadows of the Mind, Dr. Roger Penrose, a mathematician at Oxford University, enlisted the incompleteness theorem in mathematics. He uses the theorem, which states that any system of theorems will invariably include statements that cannot be proven, to argue that any machine that uses computation—and hence all robots—will invariably fall short of the accomplishments of human mathematicians. Instead, he argues that consciousness is an effect of quantum mechanics in tiny structures in the brain that exceeds the abilities of any computer.
The "theoretical question" in the last sentence of the seventh paragraph refers to ______.
选项 A、the principle of how to build a conscious machine
B、whether robot has ’consciousness or not
C、what consciousness really means
D、human beings are superior to artificial intelligence
答案C
解析 推理判断题。选项A 和D 不是本文讨论的核心问题：选项A 只不过是验证什么是意识的手段的前提条件，选项D 不是Dr. Chalmers的所要表达的本意；选项B 是干扰项，但是我们知道Dr. Hans Moravec和Dr. Chalmers都认为机器人与人没有本质差别，可以解决二者的同质问题，他们可以断定机器人有没有意识，但是仍然不能回答人们关注的意识为何物这个根本性理论问题。
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