Friday, August 03, 2007

I am therefore I think

A news article suggests that mirror neural activity is adapted to the body of the observer. Specifically, when observers who have no hands but use their feet to do tasks commonly done by hands, watched others manipulating objects with their hands, the observers' mirror neurons mapped to their feet were active. This suggests they were considering the same activity, but how they themselves would perform the activity.

Related findings in neurolinguistics suggest that understanding of a situation, concept, requires relevant experience. Furthermore, one might speculate that all understanding occurs from an egocentric perspective. That everything from contemplating photons in a model of relativity to what's for dinner occurs as effects and actions taken by the body. One might, as Einstein said he did, imagine what it was like to ride a photon. Without relevant experience, then, understanding is impossible.

As Jerome Feldman, among others pointed out, this is a death knell for disembodied artificial intelligence that is capable of natural language comprehension. Computers without the pains and pleasures of humans cannot "mirror" the experience of humans, and so, cannot comprehend the language of humans, which is grounded in the human condition. The language of pure AI would be worse than autistic; it would be alien and incomprehensible.

The language of disembodied AI would be worse than autistic; it would be alien and incomprehensible. A necessary prerequisite to human language comprehension is a sophisticated and salient model of human perception, cognition, emotion, and society. But perhaps natural language processing is not impossible. Just as a person without a hand may contemplate the behavior of a manipulation of the hand by the mental architecture mapped to their foot, an artificially intelligent computer with equivalent faculties with which to map human psychophysics, pattern-recognition, drives, desires, joy, sorrow, humor, customs, taboos, mating, game-playing, and metaphors could pass a Turing test. Such a machine without a heart, like a person without a hand, might mirror the human condition by mapping to its own worldly experience.

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