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From: daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Summary: A computer program, with the right connections, can have as much of a
	 causal relationship to the real world.
Message-ID: <1608@oravax.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jul 90 15:05:58 GMT
References: <129.26a5feab@csc.fi> <14385@venera.isi.edu> <25618@cs.yale.edu> <25621@cs.yale.edu>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca NY
Lines: 28

In article <25621@cs.yale.edu>, blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko) writes:
> 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.

Why would you say that no program has this property? It is true that a
program can be "hooked up" to the environment in an infinite number of
ways, so the relationship between program states and real-world states
is not unique. But given a particular way of hooking up a program, it
is certainly possible to create a program which has a causal
relationship to the real world. The programs which control aircraft,
for example, certainly do.

> 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.

The same could be said for a human mind. If you stuck stimulating
electrodes directly into a human brain, you could produce insensible
behavior in humans, as well. Is your point simply that humans, unlike
programs, have a natural notion of a correct hookup to the real world?

Daryl McCullough