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From: dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Message-ID: <53619@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 90 21:42:45 GMT
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Reply-To: dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
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In article <619@ntpdvp1.UUCP> kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting) writes:

>But he does *NOT* think that behavior in the wide sense
>you advocate is inadequate to determine the intelligence of asystem.  He says
>so in the original BBS article, under "The Combination Reply".  
> [...]
>but you, me, and Searle all agree that
>empirical observations of behavior over time are sufficient to convince
>any reasonable person of another's intelligence.

This is still a misstatement of Searle's position.  He is deeply
opposed to *any* behavioural criteria for intelligence.  I presume the
passage that you're referring to is the one that goes:

 "If we could build a robot whose behaviour was indistinguishable over a
  large range from human behaviour, we would attribute intentionality to it,
  pending some reason not to."

This passage has confused a few people into thinking that Searle really
does subscribe to some behavioural criteria -- but the most important part
of the passage is "pending some reason not to".  In the next couple of 
paragraphs, Searle spells out his position a little more clearly: that if
we discovered that all that was going on inside the robot was formal
symbol-processing, then we would cease to attribute any intentionality,
but instead would regard it as "an ingenious mechanical dummy".  "The
hypothesis that the dummy has a mind would now be unwarranted and unnecessary."

You're not the only one to place too much weight on this passage.  In a
"Continuing Commentary" in BBS in 1982, Yorick Wilks used this to
uncover an apparent "inconsistency" in Searle's position.  In reply, Searle
clarified the passage as follows:

 "[the passage] explains how we could be *fooled* into making false
  attributions of intentionality to robots"  (emphasis mine).

I think Searle's position is clear.

>I have tried to show that Searle's conclusion follows from his premises,
>by adding a few steps that involve no introspection and no assumptions
>of non-behavioral observations.  Nobody (except Husserl fans like
>Stephen Smoliar) wants to base any conclusions on introspection.  Searle
>certainly does not need introspection in his argument.

Actually, Searle's argument is all about introspection.  There might be other
arguments about the topic that aren't, but those arguments certainly aren't
Searle's.  As Searle frequently says: "in these discussions, always insist
on the first-person point of view."

The only trouble lies with the fact that Searle frequently phrases his
arguments in terms of "semantics" and "intentionality", rather than in terms
of phenomenology.  But this is a red herring: the arguments about "semantics"
go though only in virtue of Searle's idiosyncratic view that the right 
phenomenology (or consciousness) is a necessary prerequisite for true
intentionality.

There *is* an interesting argument about how syntax can determine semantics,
but it really has nothing to do with the Chinese Room argument, despite
Searle's protests.  The right answer to this question surely lies in some
form of the "Robot Reply" -- i.e. getting the right causal connection to the
world.  Notice that Searle's only answer to this reply is "but I still don't
feel any understanding" -- i.e. phenomenology-based semantics once
again.  Searle would have done us all a great favour if he could have stuck
to "consciousness" in the first place, without confusing the issue via
"intentionality".

At the bottom line, there are two quite separate Chinese Room problems: one
about consciousness (phenomenology), and the other about intentionality
(semantics).  These problems are quite separate -- the correct answer to the
first is the Systems Reply, and the correct answer to the second is the Robot
Reply.  One of the biggest sources of confusion in the entire literature
on the Chinese Room stems from Searle conflating these two issues.

--
Dave Chalmers     (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.

"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."