In philosophical terms, knowledge is defined as true, justified belief. Humans are capable of developing such beliefs, but are machines capable of this same mental leap? A belief is hard to define. Essentially it is a feeling or confidence that something or someone is a certain way. Can machines have feelings? What is a feeling? How can we define these feelings in concrete code? There are so many questions around the limitations of artificial intelligence.
Even if I program a robot to think, can it believe anything?
The Current State of AI
At the current moment, artificial intelligence is built upon mathematical principles. Neural networks are simply a network of nodes with different weights connecting the nodes and different levels of activation for each node. There is no conception of thought here. Other models rely on optimization techniques are seek to reduce the error made.
The whole foundation of modern machine learning deals with avoiding errors. This is done by minimizing the loss of the model. However, this mathematical behavior has little correlation with the human brain. The human brain is composed of neurons, but these are much more complex than our modeled nodes in neural networks and we still do not understand how the neurons interact with each other to produce different thoughts and behaviors. We only know that they do react and fire off to produce behavior.
Programming Thought
For those who do not program, a program is simply a procedural list of instructions that tells a machine to do something. This something could be to perform simple mathematical functions and storing information in different parts of memory. There are also instructions that make conditional decisions based on different values that are currently stored. At a higher level, a program allows a machine to produce a specific behavior which may vary depending on the input received at different times. This whole process is strictly deterministic. This means that a machine will always follow instructions and that any undesired behaviors are a result of incorrect instructions.
Assuming that human thought can be reduced to specific behavior completely dependent on our hardwiring and outside input, we still have trouble decomposing thought to the point that we see such thought as procedural instructions. Although, we can develop programs that can rewrite themselves and to produce novel behaviors, they are always cemented in these rules. The issue is if we can ever discover these rules in human behavior and then correlate these rules to rules that can be reduced to programmable instructions.
The Feeling Versus The Decision
Perhaps the hardest problem with the conception of thinking robots is the idea of decision making. It doesn't seem like each decision is hard wired into us. But are we deliberating? Or are we actually engaging in a series of simple conditional statements that we need to evaluate? Machines are stuck going down the latter path, but we don't know if that path is how human thought actually occurs. When I trust a gut feeling, am I just receiving input and taking that input and processing it through several conditional statements programmed in the network of billions of neurons? Or is there something more?
Feelings appear to be instinctual urges to move in one direction or another. But sometimes we can override such behavior using rational thought. But viewing actions in terms of procedural instructions, both of these things can be viewed as different variables. Perhaps the variable rational thought is greater than the variable instinctual feeling at different times depending on different inputs, but these two things don't feel the same, they feel completely different.
Perhaps evolution decided that deliberation was useful, and that conflicting variables called emotions and reason were also useful. But can we design a machine to behave in this way? Or did nature get considerably lucky when generating human beings? Can a machine even behave in this way? I don't know. Maybe we'll never know.
TLDR: Is it more than a feeling when I hear that old song they used to play?
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