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The Laboratory for Artifical Appearance -- Part II
Those familiar, through my last post, with the Laboratory for Artificial Appearance, may be interested in an email message I received from a friend and contact there not long ago.
[For those who are unfamiliar with the LAA, it was originally the graphics group within the computer science department of a university that shall remain nameless. It owes its inspiration (and its new name) to a revolutionary paper, which introduced the concept of "artificial appearance" by proposing the following test: a room is fitted with two high-resolution CRT monitors, one of which is connected to a camera pointed at a real person in another room, and the other of which receives its input from a computer graphics generation program. If a viewer is unable to tell, by scrutinizing the two screens, which one displays the image of a real human being--the paper's author argued--then there is no reason not to assume that the computer has artificially generated human appearance. This so-called "blurring test" has revolutionized thinking about computer graphics, prompting heated philosophical debates about the nature of human appearance, and radically altering prevailing opinions on the best approaches to its artificial simulation.]
Here is the message I received:
Hi! I hope you enjoyed your visit with us, and that your next visit will be soon. Several people here at LAA have remarked to me that they found their discussions with you to be most fruitful. I thought I'd bring you up to date on recent developments since you left. At that time, the mood here was (as I expect you perceived) fairly confident among us; we felt (and still feel) that while we have only begun to make a dent in the huge problems involved in creating artificial human appearance, we have at least been making steady progress towards that goal. Imagine our surprise, then, when a well-respected local professor of philosophy here began, just a few days later, to distribute advance copies of his soon-to-be-published article arguing that artificial human appearance is not merely difficult to achieve, but actually impossible in principle! Our surprise quickly turned to scorn, however, once we were able to study his arguments in detail. His main premise is that human appearance is inherently "continuous", and cannot be simulated by any "discrete" representation, such as a computer would generate. He illustrates his thesis as follows: suppose that he were to possess the entire text of such a representation (in, say hexadecimal code) for the appearance of a 21-year-old Chinese man in traditional wedding garb. Suppose further that a particular video monitor receives its input not from a camera or digital input, but from a device which turns short, sharp tapping sounds into numbers (the way telephone exchanges do when old-style "pulse" telephones are dialed). Then, merely by tapping on the table (or on himself, if necessary), he can, in principle, conjure up on this monitor the image of said 21-year-old Chinese man. "Does that mean", the author asks provocatively, "that I look Chinese?"
I expect I hardly need point out to you the obvious flaw in this "Chinese groom" argument. It is clearly not the man himself, but the whole array of person, text, and monitor that possesses the appearance of the Chinese man. The author himself even recognizes the possibility of this refutation, admitting that the presence of the text may make his claim of Chinese appearance suspect; he replies with a revised scenario in which he has memorized the entire text. However, he never follows the objection to its logical conclusion, recognizing that the whole combination of "hardware" and "software" can be said to be generating an artificial human appearance. In retrospect, I find it somewhat puzzling that his paper has garnered so much attention, given the weakness of its arguments. I'm interested to hear your opinion, of course, but I'd be surprised if you lent his propositions any more credence than we have. Anyway, keep in touch, and let me know when you'll be in the area again.
(I include here my reply to him:)
Well, I certainly agree with you that the philosophy professor's argument seems weak--after all, surely there is some level (molecular? subatomic?) at which the real appearance of a real person is either discrete or negligibly different from a discrete representation of it. On the other hand, I have some nagging questions about your willingness to localize appearance in what seems to me to be a rather arbitrary way. If a person, a text, an electronic apparatus, and a monitor can be said to have a human appearance, then what about the person, the text, the apparatus, the monitor, and the stand on which the monitor rests? Or all of these things, plus me? Do two people look like one person? Does a volleyball team? The earth, including all its inhabitants? I get the feeling that if I were compelled to localize human appearance (at least as defined by the "blurring test"), I would do so in an altogether different way. But I suppose I'd best defer to the experts on that score. Best of luck with your research, and I hope to visit again some time soon.
The Laboratory for Artificial Appearance -- Part I
Perhaps some recent experiences of mine will add to the current debates over machine consciousness:
I have just returned from a visit with the graphics group at a rather prestigious academic institution which shall remain nameless. I say "graphics group", but I should note that they have changed their name to "Laboratory for Artificial Appearance", and consider themselves to be grappling with much deeper problems than the mere rendering of amusing images (although the bulk of their lucrative research work is in practice of precisely this variety). Their transformation from "graphics group" into LAA began with an article published some years ago in an obscure graphics journal, but now considered a classic in the field. It proposed the following thought experiment: suppose that a television camera were pointed at a person sitting against a blank background; the resulting image (which might be either black and white or colour, and either still or moving, as the experimenter prefers) is displayed on an ordinary CRT screen in a different room. Adjacent to this screen sits another screen displaying an artificially rendered image (again, either black and white or colour, and either still or moving, to match the image on the first screen). Individuals are invited into the room to examine the screens, and to try to determine which screen is displaying the image of a real person. The article provocatively asks whether, if even very sharp-eyed viewers are unable to spot the signs of computer rendering in the artificial image, it can credibly be denied that the artificial image is in fact, the image, or (in some strict sense) the "appearance" of a human being.
The consequences for the field of this playfully-named "blurring test" have, it seems, been profound. Numerous extensions have been proposed to the original test, including the possibility for aural or tactile components to the images, and perhaps even interaction. Graphics researchers who still have difficulty producing realistic images of trees have found ample backing for their efforts to theorize about how to produce flawless renderings of the human form. Philosophical debates have abounded concerning the definition of appearance, appropriate goals for artificial appearance researchers, and most of all, what properties artificial appearance shares with its "natural" counterpart. For example, during my stay at the LAA, a heated discussion ensued concerning the property of beauty, and in particular over whether artificially-rendered humans could be considered beautiful. Many, of course, argued that no mere collection of pixels could ever be considered beautiful in the sense that real, live humans could be; much was made of the significant role of context in beauty. Some suggested that the sceptics were defining beauty too narrowly; was there no beauty, they asked, in the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo, not to mention Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie-Woogie"? The middle position, I gathered, was that, at the very least, an image which passed the blurring test deserved
to be considered as beautiful as if it were a real person, although it was widely conceded that no artificial image yet produced was worthy of the
attribution.
Two aspects of this discussion make it, I think, relevant to the question of machine consciousness: firstly, the sceptical "hard line" was frequently rebutted with references to the idea of beauty being an "emergent" property. Hence, it was argued, a collection of pixels may well be "humanly" beautiful, although it was composed of individual unbeautiful parts. Secondly, their use of the blurring test was, for me, highly evocative of the current debate; for example, they frequently asked how, if one could deny the beauty of a computer-generated image indistinguishable in "appearance" from a really beautiful woman, one could still say with even reasonable certainly that a beautiful woman herself
is really beautiful; could not her appearance, too, be secretly composed of minute dots of colour?
My only contribution to the debate was to remark once, half in jest, that I had always believed beauty to be in the eye of the beholder. There was an awkward silence, a few people coughed embarrassedly, and after a few moments the conversation continued as before. Until I left, those were the last words I dared speak on the subject.
