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From: blenko-tom@cs.yale.edu (Tom Blenko)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Chalmers on Searle
Message-ID: <25761@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 90 22:44:14 GMT
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In article <53619@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> dave@cogsci.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
|...
|This is still a misstatement of Searle's position.  He is deeply
|opposed to *any* behavioural criteria for intelligence.

Perhaps your language is just a bit casual here, but I know of no
reason to doubt that Searle has behavioral criteria for intelligence --
his claim is that they are not sufficient, not that they aren't
necessary.

|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.

I don't think Searle would agree with this.  My recollection is that
his reasoning goes something like this:  we individually have conscious
(introspective) experience and we have come to ascribe that
consciousness to other (similar) intelligent entities.  If we were to
discover that an entity displaying the necessary behavioral
characteristics nevertheless lacked introspective experience, we would
not consider it intelligent.

Having conscious experiences and establishing the (shared)
understanding that other intelligent entities have similar experiences
are two quite different things.  Evidence for the former is immediately
accessible and relates directly to introspection.  Evidence for the
latter is a far more complicated issue, and I propose has more to do
with communication, shared experience, and social conventions than with
introspection, per se.

|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.

You've said this in two different messages now, I believe, and I
suspect many people would be sympathetic with this position. However, I
don't think you've done much to argue against Searle -- in particular,
to show which part of Searle's argument you are disagreeing with, and
precisely why you claim it is incorrect.

	Tom