Xref: utzoo talk.philosophy.misc:3894 comp.ai:6552 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!tcdcs!swift.cs.tcd.ie!maths.tcd.ie!ftoomey From: ftoomey@maths.tcd.ie (Fergal Toomey) Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai Subject: Re: Why the Chinese Room doesn't convince Message-ID: <1990Apr10.160823.8048@maths.tcd.ie> Date: 10 Apr 90 16:08:23 GMT References: <23100@mimsy.umd.edu> <1990Mar19.153959.6113@sjuphil.uucp> <0541@sheol.UUCP> <1990Mar26.155415.21756@sjuphil.uucp> <0556@sheol.UUCP> <1990Apr3.162019.27598@maths.tcd.ie> <1990Apr5.202224.27534@caen.en Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Lines: 29 In article <1990Apr8.160030.1988@cs.umn.edu> thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley) writes: >I dislike two consequences of this. First, I think it is intellectually >sloppy, almost to the point of dishonesty. If I were arguing about the >country's transportation network, and I questioned the need for intra-city >roads by saying that people could walk at 20 mph, people would lose all >respect for me. If I argue about artificial intelligence and say I can >implement a human-intelligence simulator mentally, or that I can get Gary >Kasparov to give me written instructions on how to play chess at his level, >I should get quite the same treatment. Second, it trivializes the problems >involved. Programming a chess computer or a human-intelligence simulator >is not a small feat, cannot be duplicated by memorizing lists of rules or >board positions, and should not be treated as if they can. In demonstrating his theory of Relativity, Einstein, the father of the gedanken experiment, postulated the existence of trains moving at the speed of light, interstellar spaceships, also moving at the speed of light, and human observers standing on meteorites, moving at speeds close to the speed of light. A gedanken experiment should not be rejected because of wildly improbable assumptions, but only if the reasoning doesn't follow. If people could walk at 20 mph then we should certainly abolish roads. That is an "in principle" argument. We do not however abolish roads because the problem of how to get from A to B is a "practical" problem. The problem of machine understanding is an "in principle" problem. And so improbable gedanken experiments are acceptable. Fergal Toomey.