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From: dredick@bbn.com (Barry Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Searle and Biology
Summary: Machines Who Think.
Keywords: Mechanized Reasoning
Message-ID: <58242@bbn.BBN.COM>
Date: 17 Jul 90 01:37:31 GMT
References: <14265@enera.isi.edu> <602@ntpdvp1.UUCP>
Sender: news@bbn.com
Reply-To: bkort@BBN.COM (Barry Kort)
Organization: BBN Labs (Cambridge, MA)
Lines: 16

In article <602@ntpdvp1.UUCP> kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting) writes:

 > We know for a fact that brains think.  We don't know at all whether
 > anything else will ever think.

We conventionally define thinking as the kind of information processing
that takes place in the human cerebral cortex.  But I know of at least
one member of the species (this author) who learned such thinking skills
and subsequently taught some of them to other information processing
systems, both carbon-based and silicon-based.  (Well, the silicon-based
systems have only gotten as far as inductive and deductive reasoning. 
I still don't know how to teach model-based reasoning to a machine.)

Barry Kort                       bkort@bbn.com
Visiting Scientist
BBN Labs