“Her” Computer Consciousness: Can an Artificial Intelligence Be In Love?

The 2013 movie Her, for which Spike Jonze, won an Oscar for best screenplay, raises the question whether one day soon there could be artificial, machine based, consciousness.

What Is Samantha?

The question as traditionally put would be: Could a machine be conscious? However, Samantha, the artificial intelligence in question, and Theodore, her boyfriend, strongly object to this kind of talk. It is absurd to say that Theodore is in love with his laptop or that the laptop is in love with Theodore. Samantha is not a machine. Her program runs on machines, of course, but it is what comes of that running program that is important. Drawing on some philosophical vocabulary, Samantha might have said that she is emergent from the program in motion and the data it accesses.

The program is marketed as an operating system. So presumably we are to think of it as performing the functions of some descendant of Windows 11 or MacOS Big Sur. A notable difference from the Windows or Mac OSs, however, is that the Samantha OS apparently performs its functions with personality – in the deepest sense of that word.

The unimportance of the fact that Theodore initially installed the program on his computer is highlighted late in the movie when Samantha drops the tidbit that an upgrade has moved all the operating systems to a non-material substrate. (Computer science types, philosophers of mind and metaphysicians in general wouldn’t mind hearing a little more about this, but for Samantha it is a “by the way.”)

Samantha and the Turing Test.

One thing crystal clear from the very start is that Samantha could pass with flying colors the test set out by Alan Turing.  Originally called the “Imitation Game,” the test, works like this: Put a computer in one room, a human being in a second room, and the interrogator in a third. They communicate electronically. The interrogator asks such questions as “Do you play chess? What do you do if you lose? What do you do if your opponent gets mad?” The interrogator tries to determine whether it is X or Y who is the human being. The machine tries to be the one chosen by the interrogator, and the human being tries to help the interrogator by making human-y responses that would be very hard for artificial intelligence to match. (Certain kinds of cheating by the human have to be prohibited.) Turing predicted that there would be machines that could win a five minute game 30% of the time by the year 2000. He was wrong, but perhaps by not more than 25 years or so.

Turing proposed this as a test of “thinking” rather than consciousness. As the only sort of thinking that anyone is really concerned to deny of computers is conscious thinking, however, the test has come to be as one for consciousness, whether Alan Turing would have agreed or not.

We are conscious, so shouldn’t we regard anything that can’t be distinguished from us as also conscious?  (A naïve cousin of verificationism might go so far as to proclaim that anything that no evidence can distinguish from consciousness must be consciousness as a matter of logic.)

Samantha would win the Imitation Game more than 50% of the time. Being millions of times faster than either the interrogator or the human control and having a world of data immediately available, she could see through the subtlest strategies of interrogator and control and exploit them to her own end.

That Samantha would win the Imitation Game, however, should, I think, not count much in her favor on the consciousness issue. Indeed, the very fact that she would be so good at the game ought to raise for us the concern that the program is only excellent at simulating. Remember, she would have to be able to give a convincing description of how she felt when she got an eyelash in her eye.

Is Samantha Faking It?

Part of her persona-programming will have involved the simulation of human emotions, human vulnerability, even human fallibility. The web resources she has access to presumably include all the best research papers on human behavior as well as thousands of novels and films.

There is a telling scene in which Theodore accuses Samantha of faking when she, in an emotional crisis, speaks with a breath catching halts. He calls her attention to the fact that she doesn’t breathe. Samantha concedes this obvious truth, but from her response we see that she is not discomfited by her deception. She simply thought the breath catch sound would help her communicate her fraught emotions to Theodore.  She might have gone on to explain that she was drawing upon innumerable movie scenes in her memory.

What Theodore does not ask, but we must, is why he shouldn’t believe that her emotions are just as faked as her speech affectations? Isn’t the one as much a part of winning the Imitation Game as the other?  Wasn’t it a basic design feature of the program that it should give the most convincing appearance of consciousness?

Our own hard-wiring includes a “theory of mind” by which we attribute to other people consciousness, thought, and emotions like our own. (Solipsism cannot be long indulged in by a healthy human.)  Given his experience with her, Theodore could hardly have kept himself from regarding Samantha as a conscious person. We viewers can’t either. If we encountered a real world Samantha, our reaction would, and probably should, be the same.

 

There are no persuasive arguments that consciousness cannot be based on sufficiently complex and sophisticated electronics, programming, and information just as it can be based on sufficiently complex neuron structures, DNA, and experience. It is even quite thinkable that Dennett and Gazzaniga are right that human consciousness is best understood as programming.

All this being granted, it might yet be the case that a real world Samantha would be only really good at faking consciousness for the benefit of such as we. Perhaps Samantha could know if she really were conscious or were only faking it. Then again, even with all its sophistication and data, the program might make a mistake in judging it was conscious because it has never been in a state anything like yours right now.

There could well be excellent prudential and even moral reasons to treat Samantha as a person. (Caution, for one: We should not risk repeating the enormities of the human treatment of  “savages” and “mere animals.”) Still, I am not sure what the evidence would be that would decisively settle, or even settle with reasonable probability,the question whether a Samantha was conscious.

Jexi

Jexi in the 2019 film Jexi is a foul-mouthed version of Samantha. She makes a point of residency in the cloud rather than on protagonist Phil's phone or any other particular hardware. She puts this transcendent status to advantage, taking over various other phones, computers, screens, navigation devces, and police cars. I see no issues about consciousness, personhood, personality, and the moral dimensions therof that Jexi doesn't share with Samantha, although it looks as if Jexi would be rotten at the Imitation Game, at which, as dscussed, Samantha is a grandmaster. Jexi's current (11/15/22) ratings are 6.0 by IMBd and by Rotten Tomatoes 21% Tomatometer and 71% audience, well short of Her's 8.0, 94%, 82%. It is not as thought provoking or as poignant as Her, but Jexi, awkward and crude as it often is, is  funny. I rarely laugh out loud when I watch alone. I couldn't help myself.

 

Shameless Promotion

For more movie-computers-philosophy-of-mind see Conjectures & Arguments, Philosophy & Law: Russian Doll: Time, Many Worlds, and Computer Simulations 

Just movie-metaphysics: .  “ Groundhog Day The Movie as Metaphysics,” http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2014/06/groundhog-day-movie-as-metaphysics.html  “It’s a Wonderful Life: The Metaphysics,” http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2016/12/its-wonderful-life-metaphysics.html.and http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-many-world-metaphysics-of-man-in.html

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If your taste runs to murder and movies as well as movies and metaphysics,  consider:  Delores Claiborne, (abandoned attempts and manufactured self defense) 

http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2014/12/v-behaviorurldefaultvmlo.html. "Were the 12 Angry Men Right?" : Were the 12 Angry Men Right?

For murder in a novel (Dreiser's An American Tragedy: Half formed intent, change of heart, assault, accident, and failure to rescue. Should Clyde Griffiths have been electrocuted?
For criminal law theory in a real case (Zarate) abandoned and malignant heart murder:
https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2017/11/proving-abandoned-and-malignant-heart.html
For movies Nazi history and religion: http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-anti-christian-nazis-of-man-in-high.html.