Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!rti!ntpdvp1!kenp
From: kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Searle and biology
Summary: Smog returns to comp.ai
Message-ID: <602@ntpdvp1.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jul 90 02:19:53 GMT
References: <14265@enera.isi.edu>
Organization: SNA Solutions Inc., Contract Programming Group
Lines: 26

In article <14265@venera.isi.edu>, smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
> 
> Before I left on my vacation, Tom Blenko had raised the issue of whether or not
> Searle was claiming any superiority of biological implementations over those of
> silicon regarding the issue of "understanding."  Unless I am mistaken, he
> introduced this claim when he last spoke at UCLA.  His basic claim was that
> there was something about the biological substrate which enabled the
> implementation of intentionality.  He never said what that "something"
> was, but that did not prevent him from asserting that it was absent in
> any silicon implementation.  Needless to say, I had trouble buying into
> this claim.


Stephen, you are again mistaken.  Searle's PUBLISHED position on this issue
is clear, unambiguous, and has been repeated in at least three articles.

It is this: We know for a fact that brains think.  We don't know at all 
whether anything else will ever think.  Nobody in his right mind would deny 
the first assertion.  That is the extent of the "superiority of biological
implementations."

You are only obscuring an already difficult issue with such irresponsible 
hearsay.


Ken Presting  ("Hearsay from the deaf and dumb?")