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From: kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Summary: Behavior is not the only objective, public source of evidence
Message-ID: <616@ntpdvp1.UUCP>
Date: 31 Jul 90 21:28:54 GMT
References: <129.26a5feab@csc.fi> <14385@venera.isi.edu> <25618@cs.yale.edu> <1607@oravax.UUCP>
Organization: SNA Solutions Inc., Contract Programming Group
Lines: 38

In article <1607@oravax.UUCP>, daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough) writes:
> In article <25618@cs.yale.edu>, blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko) writes:
> 
> > Searle's claim is precisely that this equivalence relation is not fine
> > enough -- that if two systems are extentionally (behaviorally)
> > equivalent, it might still be the case that one was "intelligent" and
> > one was not.
> 
> 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?
> 

There are a lot of things that *could* be used to make that inference.
The first thing is the relation between behavior and the environment.
You may want to include that in the concept of "behavior", but it deserves
special mention, because the I/O behavior of a Turing machine is mostly
independent of its environment.

Then there is the fact that other people seem to be made out of the same
stuff that we are.  That is useful and relevant, even if it is not as
definitive as vitalists (not Searle) would urge.  The overwhelming majority
of organisms with human brains are indeed thinking things.  And vice versa.

Another thing is the system's past experience, if you happen to have any
knowledge of it.  If you happen to know that an organism with a human brain
is less than a month old, then you can reliably infer that it has little
intelligence, at least in the sense of knowing its way around in the world.
 
Evidence of all these types is objective and public, and has nothing to do
with anything as confusing as introspection.  There is no need to settle
too quickly for immediate I/O activity alone as a criterion for deciding
the success of AI, even if we are deliberately excluding criteria based on
the internals of a system.
 

Ken Presting  ("My brain hurts")