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From: blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Message-ID: <25621@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 23 Jul 90 10:02:31 GMT
References: <129.26a5feab@csc.fi> <14385@venera.isi.edu> <25618@cs.yale.edu> <1607@oravax.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.yale.edu
Reply-To: blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko)
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT  06520-2158
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In article <1607@oravax.UUCP> daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough) writes:
|...
|Before the "wiring" is specified, I wouldn't say that the program has
|*no* semantics; I would say rather that it doesn't have a *unique*
|semantics. The program can simultaneously be for sorting Olympic
|athletes or students.

I don't know of anyone (including Searle) who would disagree with
this.  Searle, however, is using "semantics" in a narrower sense that
applies to the relationship between the states of a system and the
(physical) state of its environment. In particular, he is claiming that
it is necessarily a bi-directional, causal relationship, and that no
program, including any one produced by an AI researcher, has this
property.

|This dependence on wiring doesn't automatically disprove Strong AI,
|however, for the reason that there is no good argument (that I know
|of) that human minds have a unique semantics, either. I happen to
|believe that it is only the extraordinary complexity of the human mind
|that makes it unlikely that anyone could come up with two completely
|different, and equally consistent interpretations of human thinking,
|as you did for a sort routine.

I don't understand this logic.  There is no assumption that the human
mind has a "unique" semantics, only that it has a causual relationship
to its environment.  If you accept that programs have no such
relationship, then their complexity is irrelevant.  If you did have a
candidate program, there are an infinite variety of ways of "hooking it
up" to its environment that would produce insensible behavior.

|I think you are right about what Searle is claiming; that behavior is
|not a sufficient test for intelligence. However, my old argument is:
|what, if not behavior, allows one to infer that other *people* are
|intelligent?

Searle has written a book which is likely to do a better job of arguing
the position than anything that appears here:

%A John R. Searle
%T Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind
%I Cambridge University Press
%C Cambridge
%D 1983

	Tom