Artificial Consciousness/Natural Language
Natural Language
And How it relates to Consciousness
It was partly the work of Noam Chomsky that broke the death-grip that behaviorists had on psychology. His work in discovering the nature of Natural Language, (Actual live languages) could not be explained adequately by the behaviorist model. As a result he opened the way for the later ascendence of the Cognitive model. It is partly because of his work, that Chatbots became practical and some chatbot designers claim their chatbots pass the Turing Test.
It is partly because of this claimed success that scientists have determined that language ability is neither necessary nor sufficient for either intelligence or Consciousness, since a Chat bot need not be either conscious nor intelligent to be able to pass the Turing Test, if the designers are correct. Most Chat bots take advantage of the willingness of humans to attribute intelligence to a discussion as long as it makes linguistic sense. Turing's test is therefore not especially interesting to science, and amounts to a license to trick rather than a serious test of either intelligence or consciousness.
In his book Wider than the Sky, The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness Dr. Edelman suggests that we separate consciousness into two phases, the first phase called Primary Consciousness may be equivalent to the consciousness found in many mammals. The second phase called Higher Order Consciousness includes Natural Language capabilities and the ability to "Think". There is reason to believe that the natural language capabilities are merely extensions of capacities found in most mammals, we have taught a number of animals to understand a limited vocabulary and a limited grammar, but only humans understand the richness of human language. However, there is some discussion about this, since there is no known difference between human conscious mechanisms and mammalian consciousness mechanisms that can explain this difference in sophistication. (reference Dr. Bernard J. Baars' book on the subject.)
--Graeme E. Smith 02:46, 27 January 2009 (UTC)