Comments on: Reverse Engineering the Turing Test

By: Cintain

Cintain — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:23:21 +0000

I like the idea and find myself thinking that it could be viable (I’m a writer, too, so I’m always running away with ideas like these). Having also received a lot of training in meditation, tho, the nagging thought I had was: “how about new learning?” I know from my own meditation practice that my thought processes can and do change. After almost eight years of daily practice, I am more-or-less aware of the signatures in my thought process that you speak of, and although slowly, they do change over time, sometimes as a result of a conscious effort to break habits of thought and action. So, could a computerized copy of “how I think” at any given point in time be able to develop new connections and new thoughts, and would that evolution be similar to mine, or would it be stuck in thinking the exact same way about things?

I believe people’s “way of thinking” (in the sense you describe) does change over the course of a lifetime as I have observed for myself as a result of my practice. Therefore it’s interesting to consider your idea in this light: it’s not the signatures of our thought process that identify us as human, but rather the ability to have those aspects of our thoughts evolve over time.

By: Seamus

Seamus — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:10:06 +0000

The problem I see is this: at best, this method is an impersonation of the human mind, not the mind itself.
True transfer of consciousness would mean that I leave my body and enter some other system. According to this method, when I die, I still cease to be, but there’s a computer program that can pretend it’s me.

@DMSamuel – Funny thing: that episode had a follow-up where the actual scientist came on board the Enterprise, and was horribly offended by how unlike her the hologram really was.

By: DMSamuel

DMSamuel — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:22:28 +0000

Interesting. I just watched an episode of Star Trek, TNG that made use of this concept. It was one of the first episodes of season 3, and Geordi had to utilize the schematics of the drives to get power to the Enterprise.

To do this, he had to go to the holodeck and have the computer take all known writings and information about one of the designers of the engine and recreate her in the holodeck so that she could talk to him.

Interesting that you bring this up now – I have to go think more about this.

Note that this would be an incredibly difficult thing to do, because you can slow never be sure that the ‘created person’ was acting in the same way the original person would have acted. In effect, you would create a proto-person that may or may not have any real similarity to the original person. How many times have you written something and thought “This isn’t quite right – it doesn’t capture exactly the tone I want.” – this is the phenomenon you will tap into because you don’t really have a good idea which things to pay more or less attention to when reconstructing the person.

By: Google’s Instant Translation (David Louis Edelman’s Blog)

Google’s Instant Translation (David Louis Edelman’s Blog) — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:46:01 +0000

[...] fool you into thinking it’s intelligent is in fact intelligent. (See my earlier screed about Turing tests and mind uploading.) In the same way, it seems to me that if you feed enough data into a pattern recognition [...]

By: Christian Sauve

Christian Sauve — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 23:42:19 +0000

Three thoughts:

1. Ever since reading Robert Silverberg’s “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another”, I’ve been convinced that Isaac Asimov will be one of the first re-created personalities. Just feed his 500+ books in the machine and see what happens.

2. Be nice to your editors: they may be your ticket to a better reincarnated you.

3. Have a look at Don Foster’s Author Unknown for a good perspective on how individual writing styles can be analysed and recognized. It’s hardly a perfect argument (he did identify Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors, but he eventually recanted his “discovery” of a lost Shakespeare poem), but it’s the kind of thing to make all pseudonymous authors think twice about their chances of remaining unidentified.