by Cam Beckett » Thu Jun 15, 2017 7:33 pm
"Voight-Kampff. Originally designed to help tell people from robots," he said, leaving out the fact that it was also originally designed fictionally. "Monitors your physical reactions to provocative questions. Ask the right questions, and we can piece together a model of what your moral judgments would be in arbitrary abstract scenarios -- because that's really what you're asking for. You want to know what you would feel is morally right or wrong before the situation comes up. Your power leads you through actions before your realize what you are, so we need to create a model of your reactions to interface with that power, allowing you to pre-judge outcomes and actions before they actualize.
The Tories would love this.
Anyway, Chinese room. Great thought exercise, you should read up on it. Picture a guy sitting in a box. The guy doesn't know Chinese, but he has a bunch of books, each one giving a set of procedures and steps to take. Someone on the outside of the box slips him a piece of paper with Chinese writing on it. The guy doesn't understand it, but dutifully goes through each step placed in his books, and passes out the result -- an answer to the question in Chinese. The guy in the box has no idea what he was asked or how he replied, but he still gives the right answer.
To those of us on the outside, it doesn't matter how the right answer comes, so long as it's right. We don't need to crack open the box and see HOW you come up with your steps, we just need to register what they are. It doesn't matter if Schordinger's sphinx is alive or dead in there."
Cam talked fast, bouncing from subject to subject as the wheels spun in his own head.