Transferred from: Department of philosophy, Nanjing University
Author: Pan Tianqun
Absrtact: intelligence is human's ability to deal with environment, which is embodied in human's language game. Lying and deception are complex types of expression that are essential to intelligence. The Turing test machine is considered to be only a linguistic processing of symbols. A strong artificial intelligence machine should have the ability to understand semantics. However, Turing actually requires that, although he does not explicitly state, the imitation game machine has or shows the ability to lie and cheat; and strong artificial intelligence cannot survive in society without the ability to lie and cheat. Therefore, if we want the AI to have enough intelligence, such AI should be designed to have the ability to lie and cheat, so that we can play language games in the sense of Wittgenstein. Lying or deception can be achieved by executing a metaprogram of an objective function or utility function; a metaprogram is a program that runs a first-order program, and a first-order program is a program that gets an honest solution. The ability to lie and cheat is the survival skill of the agent to adapt to the environment, but has nothing to do with morality.
Keywords: intelligence; artificial agent; Turing test; Searle artificial intelligence; deception; metaprogram; first-order program
Intelligence has long been regarded as the essential attribute of human beings, and the emergence or possible emergence of intelligent machines challenges human self-esteem and makes human beings fall into anxiety as a whole. No matter how philosophers define intelligence, the era of artificial intelligence is coming to us. Artificial intelligence is created in people's understanding of self owned intelligence, such as the idea of God with infinity shaped by people according to their limited understanding of self. Therefore, any knowledge and discussion about intelligence, including my discussion here, is shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
What is thinking? Turing eschews the usual way of defining the problem and adopts a functionalist approach. He determines in what sense we say machines have intelligence by giving an imitation game. In the imitation game, if a machine can not be recognized as a machine by its interlocutor, i.e. person, at a certain time, then it has intelligence. This is the so-called Turing test. Machines that can pass the Turing test are considered to have weak artificial intelligence. I don't intend to give a new definition of intelligence, in fact, any attempt to give a definition of intelligence will lead to criticism; I also don't intend to list and discuss the possible elements of intelligence, for example, reasoning ability is generally considered as an indispensable part of intelligence, while human emotions or emotions are not considered as intelligent parts, and they sometimes even affect the embodiment of intelligence. What I want to examine or demonstrate in this paper is that as an expression type of "deception", it is an essential part of intelligence. Any agent, including the future artificial agent, should have such ability, although it is not the whole of intelligence. This paper only analyzes the relationship between deception and intelligence, but not between deception and morality from the perspective of moral philosophy.
1、 A thought experiment
Expression is a kind of behavior of all organisms to deal with the environment, but different organisms adopt different ways. Different from other animals, human beings use complex language to play survival games with other people; human intelligence is embodied in expression. Let's look at a thought experiment as follows:
Imagine an agent called wooden, an agent. Wooden could be a real person or a robot. Wooden can think like normal people, that is, wooden can reason, calculate and learn, especially wooden can understand human language, including lies; but the only thing wooden can't do is lie and cheat, that is, wooden always tells the truth. In wooden's moral dogma, not to lie is the only principle of behavior, or the highest principle of behavior if there are other principles of behavior. Of course, a person who always tells the truth may face a paradox, so you can set wooden to express "I can't distinguish" or "I'm embarrassed" when facing a paradox. That is to say, wooden's only principle is true expression. As a result, when asked by others, wooden will accurately express what he knows, including his embarrassing situation.
Now our question is, does wooden have intelligence? If wooden is man-made - man-made here means that wooden is not born and grown naturally as we are, but it is made by us through some kind of material. At this time, wooden can understand what people say, but no one's birth and growth history, and wooden knows his own history. We can judge that wooden is not a human through the dialogue with wooden and continuous verification. So, does wooden have intelligence? You can imagine, because wooden doesn't lie, it obviously can't pass the Turing test. According to the Turing test, wooden does not have intelligence. According to our intuition, we don't think wooden has intelligence either, because lying is the "basic skill" of human beings, and wooden has no such skill. Of course, the complexity of such a man-made wooden depends on our technology, but no matter how complex it is, we will think it does not have intelligence.
If wooden is the same person as us, in the dialogue of imitation game with people, wooden is the same as others except that he can't lie. At this time, we can judge that he is human in the dialogue with him, but our judgment is not based on his intelligence, but on what he expresses. We can see that wooden is honest, and we can know all he can know. Does wooden have intelligence? We will hesitate to answer this question. We will at least say that wooden is a person with intellectual defect or obstacle. In fact, such wooden may exist in the actual society: Wooden is taught to speak the truth completely after birth, and he does not need to survive independently through expression; We can imagine that all the people in wooden's society are telling the truth. Such a society is unstable in the long run, because people get the additional benefit through some deviation, that is, telling the truth is not an evolutionary stability strategy. In fact, we were taught not to lie when we were young, but to lie and even cheat as we grow up.
What I have demonstrated through this thought experiment is that Searle's ability to understand is not the whole of intelligence, but the ability to cheat is a necessary part of intelligence.
Some readers will not agree with me, but may refute it as follows: whether wooden is a man-made machine or a real person, wooden does not really understand other people's words; but if wooden has a real understanding of our intention to cheat wooden, wooden cannot tell the truth. This refutation is not tenable, because there is no inevitable relationship between understanding other people's deception and not telling the truth. That is to say, even if wooden understands other people's intentions, but does not set up a mechanism to say lies in "program setting" or "thinking mechanism", wooden still does not have the ability to say lies. It is a real example that some people in the society know that others deceive them and are unable to deal with them by telling lies. Therefore, it is one thing to understand, and it is another to act according to the understanding.
2、 Deception in human existence
People often deal with others in the environment through speech expression, in which intelligence can be reflected. Speech act theory studies many types of speech act, which is not what I want to discuss. I divide expression into honest expression and dishonest expression. Dishonest expression is lying. All of wooden's expressions above are honest expressions, while people's expressions in daily life adopt a mixed strategy between "honest" and "dishonest". People lie and cheat through dishonest expression to harm others and self-interest, so dishonest expression is considered as immoral behavior. Morality is the concept of maintaining the survival of the group produced in the group. It is the judgment of individual behavior in the group. Although moral behavior is realized by individual people, morality and intelligence are not the same thing. As dishonest expression is a complex speech act, it is not necessarily immoral; dishonest expression embodies human intelligence.
Let's analyze deception in human intelligent behavior. Deception is a common phenomenon in human society. It refers to such behavior of expression, which expresses different situations from the real situation and makes the other party believe. People often cheat in order to gain self-interest, but this is not inevitable. Deception is considered to be immoral behavior, which is rarely analyzed carefully in academic circles. Cheating is closely related to lying. Deception includes lying, and lying does not necessarily have the intention of cheating. Honest expression refers to the behavior that someone expresses the state of a thing he believes in in some way, while lying refers to the behavior that someone has the intention to say a state completely different from that he believes (knows). For example, I know the subway route map of Nanjing. If passers-by is asking me, "which subway can I take to Xianlin Campus of Nanjing University?", I say "I don't know", which is a lie -- the content expressed is contrary to what I actually know; and I swear or firmly tell the other party that I know the wrong line, which is a cheat. Therefore, deception is not only to express to others what is different from what you know, but also to make them believe that what they express is true. I think readers can agree with this definition. Therefore, we can see that lying is not necessarily deception, the liar may only express a state completely different from his belief state; and there must be lies in deception, but not all the truth. Of course, persistent lying is often to deceive, because people are persistent lying because their intention is to let the other party believe that something they say is true.
To better understand deception, let's now analyze lying. It has been defined above that a person's lying refers to the act of expressing to others a proposition different from that he believes (knows). Therefore, there are several elements in lying: (1) lying is intentional. Intentionality refers to "our mental state points to, involves, relates or aims at various objects and situations in the world". Lying, like other mental behaviors, has an intentionality object, which is what he thinks lies. (2) Lying is related to expressive behavior. Speech expression is only a kind of expression behavior, and human action is also used to express, so it can also be used to lie. For example, Han Xin's "mingxiuzhandao, covertly dealing with Chen Cang" is a kind of "action lie"; therefore, we have "speech lie" and "action lie". (3) Lies are contrary to the liar's beliefs rather than facts. The "opposite" here means that belief and lie can be "false" but not "true". Because what he believes is not necessarily true, it is possible that because an expressionist holds a false belief, he thinks he has expressed a lie, and he actually describes a real state, so at this time, he does not lie at the expressionist's place, but in fact he has said a lie. this