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We fundamentally suggest that Searle's famous thought experiment also targets
the analogous notion of 'strong computational creativity'. I.e. Searle using a similar
“room” could get so good at following the rules that the strings of symbols he
outputs from the room successfully control a 'Strong' computationally controlled
creative art-system, producing works judged to have artistic merit by people outside
the room, even though Searle-in-the-room remains ignorant of the produced art and
the externally labelled 'art practise'. To paraphrase Dennett's deployment of 'the
intentional stance', the computational system is merely instantiating a form of 'as-
if creativity' without any real cognitive states, meaning or intentionality. I.e. Any
'creativity' ascribed to the computational system is merely a reflection of the engineer
that designed it and the user who operated it in a given social nexus.
2.5 The Body in Question
In our opinion Searle's Chinese room argument suggests that to take the notion
of 'Strong creativity' seriously we need to move away from purely computational
explanations of creativity and look at how human meaning and creative processes
are fundamentally grounded in the human body and society; taking the body, issues
of embodiment and our social embedding, much more seriously. And this 'strong'
notion of embodiment cannot simply be realised by opting a putative computationally
creative system onto a conventional 'tin can robot'. 1
As Nasuto, Bishop et al. [ 28 ] a fortiori argue in their discussion of Biologically
controlled animats 2 and the so-called 'Zombie' animals 3 (two examples carefully
chosen to lie at polar ends of the spectrum of possible engineered robotic/cyborg
systems), merely instantiating appropriate sensorimotor coupling is not sufficient to
instantiate meaningful intentional states, as in both cases the induced behavioural
couplings are not the effect of the intrinsic nervous system's constraints (metabolic
or otherwise) at any level. On the contrary, they are actually the cause of extrinsic
metabolic demands (made via the experimenter's externally directed manipulations).
Since the experimenter drives the sensorimotor couplings in an arbitrary way (from
the perspective of the intrinsic metabolic needs of animal or its cellular constituents),
the causal relationship between the bodily milieu and the motor actions and sensory
readings can never be genuinely and appropriately coupled. Thus Nasuto and Bishop
[ 28 ] assert that only the 'right type' and 'directionality' of sensorimotor couplings
can ultimately lead to genuine understanding and intentionality.
1 Whereby a robot body is imply bolted on to an appropriateAI and thematerial of that 'embodiment'
is effectively unimportant.
2 Robots controlled by a cultured-array of real biological neurons.
3 E.g. An animal whose behaviour is 'remotely-controlled', by an external experimenter, say by
optogenetics; see also Gradinaru et al. [ 20 ], who used optogenetic techniques to stimulate neurons
selectively, inducing motor behaviour without requiring conditioning.
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