Also, knowledge such as the skill of how to ride a bike, obviously ZERO language involved there.

You know the question becomes a whole different thing if it ever came to pass.  No doubt, you would look inside and check if it was human and then wonder, how did it do that?

That was exactly my point; show a machine that is (by measure of all the tests applied) human-like, and then show that it’s actually a machine and not someone faking it in some way.

So the real proof is in looking inside the box !

Yes, without actually proving that something that seems intelligent is not just a human pretending to be machine, then I would not be a believer.

However, with that said, I can only guess that when (not if) this type of “program” is created, looking “in the box” to “see” how the “program” works would be a lot like a cave man trying to figure out how an iPhone works by bashing it on a rock and looking at the innards.  In fact, the first true ‘intelligent machine’ may be designed and assembled by other machines, and end result may simply not be understandable by normal (non-transhuman) humans.  So- could a lay person ever be convinced it was not a human? 

In fact, could a transhuman not be considered just a less efficient computer instead of a more efficient human? And where does that leave your black box?!

Victor Shulist - Mar 14, 2011:

Language is a tool of knowledge.

Nope, language is a tool of communication. And communication ‘can be’ an aspect of intelligence.

Language is really only symbolic representation that is mapped to concepts. It is purely devised to give us the possibility to communicate. Look at the difference between grammatical and iconic languages; they have very little in common but both facilitate the same thing, being communication.

Language is a representation we agree to (by learning that particular language) so we can communicate with others that can communicate in the same language. If we want to be able to communicate with people that use a different language, we need to agree to their language as well (by learning it), so we can again communicate. And all this ‘communication has very little correlation to ‘being more or less knowledgeable’ (unless it’s knowledge about language, that’s why I keep stating that language is a learned human trait).

Art is communication, not just perception. The point I make is that some communication is very difficult using only language.  It is why one would struggle so hard to be the most human. And why many tests for humanity might be impossible to communicate.

Only the other hand, as you have sparked the notion for me, there is Helen Keller.  She transformed into a noble person once she learned how to communicate beyond just primative gesters.  Her profound expressions could be an inspiration for us all.

I just point out that the confidence of being human wanes as the body/mind dichotomy changes due to physical constraints. I guess that’s part of understanding.  I don’t think I could relate to the void in which machines exist.  I’d hesitate to call it humanlike at all.  A machine that would communicate something other than the reality in which they reside I might consider mentally ill.  What do they call it when you are caught in an illusion (like being Santa Claus)?

Hans Peter Willems - Mar 14, 2011:

Victor Shulist - Mar 14, 2011:

Language is a tool of knowledge.

Nope, language is a tool of communication. And communication ‘can be’ an aspect of intelligence.

Yep, communication of knowledge. 

I think we’re going to head down another rabbit whole of defining what knowledge is.

I think what ends up happening here for the most part is just a never ending recursive rabbit hole of misunderstanding of the real meaning of words.  It’s an endless cycle.

Until we REALLY all agree on what :

a) understanding
b) knowledge
c) knowing
d) thinking
e) understanding

etc, etc,  *mean*, it is pretty pointless to argue really.

Anyway, I respect your beliefs, and I trust you respect mine.  Agree to disagree, and move on now… This thread and poll has served its purpose, thanks everyone.

Patti Roberts - Mar 13, 2011:

I still wonder why humans are so insistent that intelligence is defined by being “human”.  This planet has millions of humans if someone is in need of conversing with a human. Is mimicry of all things human actually a “good thing”?

I am in absolute agreement with this.  In the design of my bot, I place no importance on emulating human behavior.

This is a hypothetical question.  If I ask a school child ‘you have 2 apples, and take away 1 apple, how many left?’  . .. do I really need the actual apples?

Can you explain to me how this hypothetical question is knowledge, if language is (communicating) knowledge? It is not anything experienced, or a rule or common sense of some sort. Not declarative knowledge, not episodic, not sensory, not procedural, etc. Perhaps communication is really something else, maybe something like commanding others to do our will. I sometimes feel the questions I offer, like how Aristotle taught, are only demands in disguise. (I probably watched “Cops” once too often.)

Victor’s original criteria of the survey.

But it passes a turing test, learns, understands, and by that I mean, no matter how you test it, it *** DOES everything as good as a human, if not better.

Victor’s later blog entry (which I’m guessing suggests he isn’t going to use the survey’s data to make his bot.)

In the design of my bot, I place no importance on emulating human behavior.

What purpose did the survey serve? What results were found about being result driven or being philosophical or it being information processing?

Are you saying it doesn’t matter anymore? Did any of it change your beliefs - did you learn something?

I hope I helped instead of just debating. I know I picked an answer that was not on your list, that is, “I don’t know, period.”, sorry.

Hans Peter Willems - Mar 14, 2011:

Language is really only symbolic representation that is mapped to concepts. It is purely devised to give us the possibility to communicate.

Language is much more than that. Symbols are essentially substrate-independent; their vibratory qualities are independent of what they represent. For example, the word “rose” and a real rose are arbitrarily associated (as can be seen by different languages having different words for the same concept of “rose”, and the same language changing its word for rose over time).

Because of this substrate-independence, because symbols are much less connected to any particular vibration than the real objects they represent, we can manipulate them much easier. For example, I can take the word “rose” and modify it with “blue”, which might never occur to me if I’m limited to seeing roses in the physical world. Or perhaps I could paint it; but that requires more energy than simply thinking it.

So language makes it easier to hypothesize, experiment, combine concepts in linguistic ways that might yield interesting results that potentially increase knowledge. Puns, syntax, ambiguity all play a role in this creative process.

I can say “the sun revolves around the earth” and then reverse subject and object and say “what if the earth revolves around the sun?”, which is much easier to do first with language than if I was just thinking in terms of pictures. Or I can say “a photon is a wave and a particle” even if I can’t picture it, or I can write equations that represent a hypercube and use them to do useful things even if can’t “see” more than three dimensions. Einstein made testable predictions using symbols representing spacetime even though it is a very unintuitive concept to us.

Language is a representation we agree to (by learning that particular language) so we can communicate with others that can communicate in the same language. If we want to be able to communicate with people that use a different language, we need to agree to their language as well (by learning it), so we can again communicate. And all this ‘communication has very little correlation to ‘being more or less knowledgeable’ (unless it’s knowledge about language, that’s why I keep stating that language is a learned human trait).

Whether I read Euclid in the original or in translation, I’m not communicating with him so much as learning what he knew.

In conclusion: language, in abstracting out vibrations from things as they exist in the real world, gives us power to manipulate them in ways that we might never think of unless we had language. Whether or not we choose to communicate those other ways is separate from the formulation of them in language. For example, I can write a program (using computer language) that changes the laws of physics within a simulation, and no other human need ever see it.

Think of the word pi. Could the concept exist without language? You can draw a circle of diameter 1, but you won’t be able to measure the complete value represented by the word “pi” from it…you need language, symbols, to create the concept of an irrational number.

Robert Mitchell - Mar 15, 2011:

Because of this substrate-independence, because symbols are much less connected to any particular vibration than the real objects they represent, we can manipulate them much easier. For example, I can take the word “rose” and modify it with “blue”, which might never occur to me if I’m limited to seeing roses in the physical world. Or perhaps I could paint it; but that requires more energy than simply thinking it.

I totally agree that ‘having language’ gives us possibilities beyond ‘communication’. Nevertheless, that still doesn’t say anything about knowledge being dependent on language.

Robert Mitchell - Mar 15, 2011:

I can say “the sun revolves around the earth” and then reverse subject and object and say “what if the earth revolves around the sun?”, which is much easier to do first with language than if I was just thinking in terms of pictures.

I argue that you do actually think in ‘pictures’ first, or better stated, in ‘abstract concepts’, and then put that into words. The whole notion of planets rotating around other planets is not the result of the words describing it, the words are the result of the abstract concept.

If you see or experience something that you don’t know the name for (i.e. the language to represent it) you are still able to comprehend it (at least to a certain degree).

Robert Mitchell - Mar 15, 2011:

In conclusion: language, in abstracting out vibrations from things as they exist in the real world, gives us power to manipulate them in ways that we might never think of unless we had language.

We can turn that around: a picture says more then a thousand words! Now why do we have such a saying? I think it is because ‘language’ is not even capable of describing everything that we can think of (one of the reasons that language is adapting, probably to new ways of thinking about something).

Robert Mitchell - Mar 15, 2011:

Think of the word pi. Could the concept exist without language? You can draw a circle of diameter 1, but you won’t be able to measure the complete value represented by the word “pi” from it…you need language, symbols, to create the concept of an irrational number.

Actually, the word ‘pi’ is an incredible dense abstraction of what it really depicts. It’s a symbol tagged onto a very complex system of concepts, beliefs and experiences, so we can communicate about ‘pi’ without having to explain the whole kit and kaboodle that underlays that symbolic abstraction.

The word ‘pi’ is therefor an excellent example of how we use ‘language’ (or words) to facilitate communication. It shows how language is actually ‘symbolic abstraction’.

To put language in prespective with computer programs, so far I’ve heard of systems that save parse trees or systems that save kernel facts derived from inputs or systems that change other kinds of data that represents what the text they are given is, but I have yet to find an approach that only saves the user’s utterances as it’s data (except one I made about 25 years ago.) Why is it that what a person says has to be translated into something symbolic (and more meaningful) in the computer before it is used in reasoning and other computations if language itself is the message (or “the media is the message” as the quote goes)?  In other words, why do we almost always make other abstractions when we already have “the” abstraction directly given to us?

Hans Peter Willems - Mar 15, 2011:

Robert Mitchell - Mar 15, 2011:

I can say “the sun revolves around the earth” and then reverse subject and object and say “what if the earth revolves around the sun?”, which is much easier to do first with language than if I was just thinking in terms of pictures.

I argue that you do actually think in ‘pictures’ first, or better stated, in ‘abstract concepts’, and then put that into words. The whole notion of planets rotating around other planets is not the result of the words describing it, the words are the result of the abstract concept.

If you see or experience something that you don’t know the name for (i.e. the language to represent it) you are still able to comprehend it (at least to a certain degree).

I think we’re running into the wall between “what constitutes information about a fact” and “how human beings in particular store and manipulate information”. Information about an event can be stored in any number of representations—pictorially, aurally, symbolically. But a rule system of symbolic storage (grammar) allows humans to handle and manipulate that data much more easily. This is because humans can only hold a certain amount of discrete ideas in our heads at once and the number is surprisingly small. So by grouping together multiple events and ideas under one symbolic header, we can manipulate and consider more events at once.

This is why you’re both right, lol. Language is not just another representation system for humans, it is vitally necessary for us even to think about complex ideas. But this is do to the restricted ability of our brains. Complex knowledge manipulation can indeed be performed without language, but probably not by me.