AboutChuck Cosby Expertise I can answer questions about speech recognition and natural language understanding. I am particulary strong in knowedge based natural langauge techniques. I cannot answer questions about robotics, nueral nets, prolog, or vision recognition - just speech and natural language.
Experience I have spent 25 years developing natural language software products. I have never developed speech systems, but I have developed sophisticated interfaces from natural language to speech. I have been working with speech recognition systems also for 25 years.
This question seems to be an absolutely essential, and core question, whose answer difinitively separates humans, from what would seem to be all future digital machines with AI. An answer that would explain why a human has a "spirit of something", while a machine with AI does not have a "spirit of something". Or, personal-empirically, it would at least separate me from future digital machines.
The core "spirit" question being, why do colors appear as colors? It is not the mere question, "does red look like red to another person or machine?", but specifically, "why does red look like red?".
If you connect a camera to a digital AI in the future, it can only interpret the sensor data as an array of points, with each point containing a set of numbers. A set of three numbers, when modeling for most humans. Three, for red, green, and blue reception, or three for intensity, hue, and saturation, as you prefer. A machine can tell you that 0 degrees hue, is the string "RED", and 180 degrees hue, is the string "CYAN", but to the machine, it is only a 3 dimensional number, that can be categorized, and it is without the sensory qualia that humans experience as "red-ness" or "cyan-ness" in "color", with no regard to numbers, as the qualities are innate to vision, in biological flesh. So how can a machine truly "see" color, when it is merely a numerical representation? Does the electronic-phosphor of the camera, send a secondary message through the elecctronics of it's systems, showing the very "color-ness" nature of the molecules, interacting with photons, on the sensor, as "seen" by the computer ... I say it doesn't, as only a triad of digitized numbers, in an arrayed stream of data, is sent through the channel, to the digital processor. A machine may, at a higher level of abstraction, have shape data with color attributes like "RED" or "RED-ORANGE" attatched, but these are just strings, and moreso, just a color ID number in the table of color strings. Now a human can look at a shape with the word "RED" typed all across it's surface, but it doesn't make the color of the shape red. Only the photons of light that are red, that strike the retina, and are interpreted by the brain, will do that for a human.
Is there *really* a certain level of number-variable interpretations in heirarchy, that will make a machine actually sense colors, only when processed enough, and brought to some colorful level of interpretation? Or if you add a color monitor, and camera pointed at the monitor, to a machine, and have it sealed in it's core, and then have the monitor display what a camera *outside* of the machine is "looking at", does the color monitor inside the machine, and the color sensors in the sealed camera, at a quantum physical level, give the digitizing camera *inside* the machine, a sense of colors, or is it just nesting the same problem, in a potentially infinite regression, of cameras and monitors leading to the real world colors sensed by the outermost camera, that is outside of the machine?
I believe this is a very important basic question, perhaps with no answers, without a "higher power" of analysis, as flesh with "something-ghosts", or "something-spirit" sense one thing, whilest all future digital machines of finite complexity, will only see numbers, or color ID's, without there being some blurring of the lines, between the digital machine, and the analog flesh. And does this perhaps mean, that to create a thinking feeling machine, we need to throw in an amorphous lump of unprocessed silicon connected to all of the digital processes, in order to blur the machine's sense, and make colors appear to the machine's stone "spirit", at that point?
I can't quite answer this one, but your commentary answer would be appreciated. It's simple, but it's deep.
Answer I generally agree with your conclusions. I have never believed that AI can re-produce human consciousness (which is what you are really talking about). It can only process information in a very sophisticated and tricky way. There may be a deeper level to the universe where our 'life energies' exist. perhaps at some quantum interface level. and it is from here that we sense and feel color and all the other things that make us human. here is a general explaination of AI I like to use:
AI is based on the ability to communicate with a computer. The obvious best way is through speech. It would also be good for computers to be to 'see' as well. The problem with true conversational speech interaction - human to computer - is enormous. This problem has not been solved and won't be for at least 5 - 10 years. What about all the telephone based speech systems that United Airlines and Amtrak and others use? These are extremely primitive systems that can't really converse with the user even in the most basic sense. They ask simple questions and expect simple answers. What is the definition of AI as it relates to conversational speech based interaction? Of course you can see in the movies and on TV what the expectation is. The most extreme was the movie AI where the small boy in the film was an 'android' and could be 'loved' by humans. This kind of thing is centuries in the future if ever. What we would like to see as a first approximation of AI is a functional conversional system for purchasing products (like airline tickets) in a completely natural conversational fashion as if you were talking to a human. This may occur in the next 10 years or so. You might also be able to manipulate other software programs with natural conversation such as Microsoft Office. This will be the primary practical advantage of AI, the ability to control computers and machines.
