Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!uw-beaver!cornell!oravax!daryl
From: daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Searle and Radical Translation (was: Re: Searle and Biology)
Summary: Searle and Presting apply a double standard; unfair to Turing machines!
Message-ID: <1603@oravax.UUCP>
Date: 18 Jul 90 23:28:07 GMT
References: <14265@enera.isi.edu> <602@ntpdvp1.UUCP> <1595@oravax.UUCP> <606@ntpdvp1.UUCP>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca NY
Lines: 62

In article <606@ntpdvp1.UUCP>, kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting) writes:
> In article <1595@oravax.UUCP>, daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough) writes:
> > In article <602@ntpdvp1.UUCP>, kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting) writes:
> > 
> > > 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."
> > 
> > . . .  I would hesitate to say that "we know for a fact that brains
> > think" until we agree on what counts for knowledge in something like
> > this. . . .
> 
> Sorry to have been obscure - I was hoping merely to put to rest an 
> unproductive issue.
> 
> By "Brains Think" I of course meant "Brains Can Think".  Anyone who denies
> this thereby implies either that he is not thinking (which is absurd), or 
> that he is thinking with something other than his brain (his organs of 
> succession, perhaps).

Ken, I notice that your responses are getting more irritable. I
apologize if it is because you think I am just being difficult.  I'm
not trying to be difficult. Honest.

I wasn't questioning what you mean by "brains think"; I was
questioning your claim that "We know for a fact that..." That is what
the Chinese Room is all about, ultimately: what counts as evidence
that a system thinks or understands. My claim was that Searle uses
a double standard; his criterion for evidence that a computer program
thinks is much stronger than his criterion for evidence that other
human beings think.

> > However, Searle denies the validity of using behavior as a test for
> > intelligence. What else is there? Well, introspection: I know that I
> > think because I experience myself thinking. This introspection doesn't
> > get me any closer to knowing that *brains* (plural) think; only that
> > *I* think.
> 
> This is either a misreading of Searle, or an (unwarranted) assumption about
> the implications of his views.

You misunderstood the above paragraph. The only idea that I am
attributing to Searle is that he "denies the validity of using
behavior as a test for intelligence". The rest of the paragraph is my
own thoughts.

> He is concerned *only* with programs and the consequences of
> implementing them.  In particular, he denies that implementing a
> program attaches any semantics to the symbols it prints.

Yes, that is exactly what I mean by Searle's double standard. He
insists that behavior (implementing a particular program) is not
sufficient for establishing understanding on the part of computers,
but it seems to me that behavior is exactly what we have to go on in
deciding that other people have understanding. The idea of the Turing
test is that to be fair, we should apply the same criterion for
understanding to machines that we do to all people other than ourselves:
we let judge based on behavior.

For ourselves, we have additional information, namely introspection.

Daryl McCullough