Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!uw-beaver!cornell!oravax!daryl
From: daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Summary: Behavior includes the relationship between a system's outputs and
	 the past history of the system.
Message-ID: <1620@oravax.UUCP>
Date: 1 Aug 90 13:59:21 GMT
References: <129.26a5feab@csc.fi> <14385@venera.isi.edu> <25618@cs.yale.edu> <616@ntpdvp1.UUCP>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca NY
Lines: 71

In article <616@ntpdvp1.UUCP>, kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting) writes:
> In article <1607@oravax.UUCP>, daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough) writes:
> > ...what, if not behavior, allows one to infer that other *people* are
> > intelligent?
> > 
> 
> ...
> 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.

To me, behavior necessarily includes interaction with the environment.
For a Turing machine, the idea of environment is purposely limited,
but it is not absent: the environment is the input tape, which the
TM's behavior certainly does depend on.

> ...
> Then there is the fact that other people seem to be made out of the
> same stuff that we are. The overwhelming majority of organisms with
> human brains are indeed thinking things.  And vice versa.

In the context of my original question, this appears to be circular
reasoning:

     Q: How can one know that other human beings are intelligent?
     A: Because they all have have human brains.
     Q: But, how do you know that human brains indicate intelligence?
     A: Because all human beings have them.

In practice, how is this vicious circle broken? I claim it is by first
concluding, based on behavior alone, that most human beings are
intelligent, and then by asking what feature of human beings seems to
be responsible for this behavior. It seems to me that judging
intelligence from behavior must come first.
	
> Evidence of all these types is objective and public, and has
> nothing to do with anything as confusing as introspection.

I think you would see the role of introspection in all of this if you
would only use a little 8^) The question that started all this Chinese
Room stuff off was: "Is behavior sufficient to determine whether a
system is intelligent"? The Strong AI position assumes that the answer
to this question is "yes". Your disussion of radical translation seems
to show your general agreement with this position. Yet, in my reading
of Searle, he is in disagreement with this position.

To me, the Chinese Room is an attempt to show that a system may
behaviorally show intelligence and yet not be intelligent. Searle's
argument depends critically on introspection: Searle claims that deep
down, we all know the difference between *really* understanding
something and being able to follow a set of rules to fake
understanding. If introspection didn't tell us that there was a
difference, why would it occur to us to make such a distinction?

If you ignore introspection, I would see no plausibility to Searle's
Chinese Room argument at all. As it is, I still don't find it
compelling for precisely the reason that the introspection of the man
in the room is irrelevant.

> 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.  

You seem to have a much narrower notion of "behavior" than I have. To
me, a system's behavior is the relationship between the system's past
history and its future actions, and not simply "immediate I/O
activity". If you deliberately exclude criteria based on internals of
a system, then behavior is all that one has left.

Daryl McCullough