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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Summary: Behavior may not be the only objective, but it is hard to eliminate.
Message-ID: <14488@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 1 Aug 90 23:33:27 GMT
References: <129.26a5feab@csc.fi> <14385@venera.isi.edu> <25618@cs.yale.edu> <1607@oravax.UUCP> <616@ntpdvp1.UUCP>
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In article <616@ntpdvp1.UUCP> kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting) writes:
>In article <1607@oravax.UUCP>, daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough)
>writes:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
However, the issue is not one of introspection but rather whether or not
behavior is a primary source of evidence.  Except for the argument based
on what stuff the intelligent agent is made out of, the sources of evidence
cited above still involve the observation and interpretation of behavior.
Daryl's question still seems to stand.

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