Comment by coldtea
2 days ago
>Similarly, “it must be intelligent because it talks” is a fallacious claim, as indicated by ELIZA.
If intelligence is a spectrum, ELIZA could very well be. It would be on the very low side of it, but e.g. higher than a rock or magic 8 ball.
Same how something with two states can be said to have a memory.
Interestingly, I found this related bit in Scott Alexander's blog:
In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property, the integrated information level, dubbed Φ. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson complained that thermostats could have very high levels of Φ, and therefore integrated information theory should dub them conscious. Tononi responded that yup, thermostats are conscious. It probably isn’t a very interesting consciousness. They have no language or metacognition, so they can’t think thoughts like “I am a thermostat”. They just sit there, dimly aware of the temperature. You can’t prove that they don’t.