This story is the ninth installment (of eleven planned installments, for now) in my "Origins of a Writer" Series.
You can find previous parts on my page or by searching "Origins of a Writer" on the top left.
If you don't have time to read the previous parts, it's okay! Lucky for you, the actual stories aren't related, so all you really need to know before you start reading Part 9 below is the Author's Note portion of Part 1. And just because I'm so accommodating, here it is (apologies to those who are actually reading all parts, you can just skip ahead) ---
Believe it or not, but I wasn't always a great writer (if you're laughing at this statement, I can't hear you).
In my first year of college at UC San Diego, I took a class called 'Theatre And Film' (I think), in which we studied (watched) films that were based on stage plays. Instead of exams, we were graded on essays comparing each adapted film we studied to its original written play.
Obviously, I got an 'A' in this class (this is a verifiable fact, and I am boasting because it was my first A in college). But on a more serious note, this class (and the 'A' grade, just saying) was particularly important to me because it was the first time I wrote something I wanted to write.
Basically, when historians in the future research my life, they will find traces of Launchora's origins in this class.
So to continue celebrating Launchora's first week of story-publishing (i.e. June 20-27, 2014), I'm going to publish some of my college writings/essays in this multiple part series, which I would like to call "The Origins of A Writer". Yes, I just made that up and then changed the name of this story to reflect it.
---- End of Author's Note from Part 1
This essay (part 9 of the series) is the last one in the third segment of my college writing, which I wrote during a class called CAT 3 (a decent sequel to Culture, Art, Technology 2). And no I didn't get an A. I got an A-.
This essay was written (finished) on June 4, 2009, and is reproduced here word-for-word, typo-for-typo. As always - don't judge my writing, judge 19-year-old me's writing (yes I'm 19 by this time in case you skipped a couple parts).
Spoiler Alert: As has become common in my college essays, this one features an analysis of a film as well -- Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
ESSAY NINE
I, Conscious?
In the Mystery of Consciousness, John R. Searle describes two kinds of definition - analytical and common-sense. He begins the excerpt with the common-sense definition of consciousness by referring to it as
“those states of sentience and awareness that typically begin when we are awake from dreamless sleep and continue until we go to sleep again, or fall into a coma or die or otherwise become “unconscious.” Consciousness, so defined, switches off and on.” (Reader, p179)
However, Searle uses the rest of the excerpt to provide the reader with a detailed, analytical definition for consciousness by using examples, experiments, and by responding to critiques and questions. If asked the question “are any of the machines in Terminator 2: Judgment Day conscious?”, Searle’s common-sense definition would suggest the answer to be “Yes, they are conscious” since we see the Terminator turn on and off and eventually die. However, his analytical definition would lead to the answer beginning with “They can be..”, followed by another detailed explanation.
In the car scene where Sarah, John, and the Terminator are on their way to Mexico, the Terminator tells Sarah about how their future came to happen. He tells them that Skynet became “self-aware” after human decisions were removed from the system. According to him, Skynet, the maker of the Terminator and the T-1000, is conscious. In an earlier scene, when asked whether he can think and learn by himself, the Terminator replies that he is made to be a learning computer but “Skynet sets the switch to read-only when we are sent out alone.” Through these scenes, it is apparent that Skynet is to the Terminator and the T-1000, what we are to the laptop. However, the difference is that we are unable to give our machines consciousness because we still do not understand how conscious is created, whereas Skynet doesn’t give its machines conscious because it chooses not to. However, as described by Searle, self-awareness, although a feature of conscious, wouldn’t be enough to guarantee consciousness of the machines. He describes consciousness to be a feature of the human brain, and even if we, or a machine as in the case of Skynet, are able to create an artificial brain, it would still not be able to assure the presence of consciousness.
Searle’s definitions and criteria for consciousness are based on the facts that humans have so far been unable to create consciousness due to lack of understanding of how the human brain works. In the film, we are told that Skynet was able to become self-aware, and also that the Terminator, although unable to during the course of the story, can think for itself. Moreover, we are still unaware to the extent of the apparent consciousness of the machine characters, and therefore, cannot provide a sure answer whether they will be able to pass Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment, which he uses as the preliminary test for the presence of consciousness. Therefore, assuming that Searle works on an answer for the question (of whether these machines are conscious) using the factors provided by the story, his definitions and criteria might not be sufficient to guarantee the presence of consciousness. His reply would then involve a more detailed analysis of the machines’ behavior, leading to the answer “They can be.”
At the same time, since we are only told of the machine’s ability to be conscious without any actual proof, that too by a machine, it would be essential to speculate whether this is only a given property of the machine by Skynet, and that maybe Skynet itself is only conscious to the extent required for it to be; making it too conscious in some aspects, leading to a form of non-human-consciousness. Therefore, Skynet, as speculated, would only have been able to create its own form of a consciousness, which may or not be the same as human or animal consciousness - making the matter of such consciousness “observer-relative”, as put forward by Searle.
Searle states “where consciousness is concerned, reality is the appearance” (Reader, p192) and that “behavior by itself is irrelevant”(Reader, p188). These machines are created to behave as if they have consciousness, making the information irrelevant to whether they are conscious. Even if Skynet itself has a form of man-made consciousness, “formal symbol manipulation and syntax by itself have no mental content, conscious or otherwise”(Reader, p190) and therefore the information is not sufficient to guarantee the presence of human consciousness.
Moreover, even if Skynet is able to create consciousness it would still be doing so computationally by reducing the phenomenon to smaller things, which goes against Searle’s idea of consciousness being a “real and irreducible part of the real world.” And even if these machines are conscious, it is only because humans created them to be able to have a consciousness, and they they would forever remain “a tool that we have created” (Reader, p190). Also, while discussing the problems faced when understanding consciousness, Searle states that the theory of causation does not apply to human consciousness. However, this theory is a vital part of machine consciousness, since for the machine every single action or reaction that signifies consciousness would be the effect of a program or process. Therefore, the idea of the machine being conscious is weighed down due to the theory of causation playing a role in the matter.
In the film, during a conversation between Miles Dyson and his wife, Dyson is heard telling his wife how he is working on “a supercomputer and other computers are just pocket calculators in comparison.” Searle would disagree to such a comparison, since in his opinion the machines, laptops, or calculators, would just be different machines made with different programs to fulfill different needs. The complexity of one machine wouldn’t be sufficient to make the T-1000 any superior to a pocket calculator.
“Consciousness only exists when it is experienced as such.” (Reader, p192)
Consciousness is a non-stop phenomenon. If we were to even stop and create consciousness, it wouldn’t be possible to recreate the entire phenomenon or to even refer to it as human consciousness since the hence created consciousness wouldn’t have the current features of consciousness - that is, it would not be able to add new experiences to itself and learn naturally as it does; in some sense, it wouldn’t be alive. So, even if at the time Skynet was able to become self-aware and was equipped with human-form consciousness, it possibly couldn’t have all the same properties as the human-form does. When scientists created the artificial heart, they named it ‘artificial” since just by behaving the same as a real heart it didn’t mean it was a real heart.
In Searle’s opinion, we can teach a machine sarcasm by teaching it the meaning, as seen in the film where John teaches the Terminator how to be more human, but we would still be unsuccessful in teaching the machine to feel the sarcasm. In the scene where Sarah is repairing the Terminator’s wounds, John asks him whether he feels pain or not, to which the Terminator replies “I sense injuries; the data could be called pain.” Searle defines this data, or the Terminator’s “detailed files”, as information. According to him, information by itself is irrelevant and as such “does not guarantee consciousness.”
We can teach the machine to do anything, from doing the opposite of a given command, to random things, to creating random words. We can create a program telling the machine to go beyond and create their own language, using the given languages. We could even imagine teaching them to do many things by themselves. However, we would still not be able to make them do something that we ourselves can’t do or create or imagine. All of these actions performed by the machine would still have been triggered from a existing file or data. No matter how much we attempt to teach a machine to be spontaneous, the act itself, of teaching spontaneity would make us deviate from our goal.
The Terminator and the T-1000 may meet some criteria for consciousness, as defined by Searle, but they are unable to satisfy all the conditions that would guarantee the presence of consciousness. By the end of his explanation, Searle’s response to the question would have modified to “Although someday machines may be able to, these machines are not conscious since no matter how much freedom they may have to think and learn they still operate for a purpose or an objective.”