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From: vic@corona.Solbourne.COM (Vic Schoenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, Strong AI, and Chinese Rooms
Message-ID: <1990Nov15.204949.12075@Solbourne.COM>
Date: 15 Nov 90 20:49:49 GMT
Sender: news@Solbourne.COM
Organization: Solbourne Computer, Inc.
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I am enjoying this revisiting of the Chinese Room as much as ever this
time around, but once again I feel we are having all the fun at Searle's
expense. Typical of the Searle bashing is this conclusion to the posting
by Svend Jules Fjerdingstad:

>         Searle's article, and others like it, always makes me think of the
> apparent paradox, that the people most strongly opposed to the notion of
> artificial intelligence are sometimes those, who seem less well endowed with
> natural intelligence :-)

I suppose it's possible that AI researchers are smarter than philosophers,
but there are other possibilities. For example, Searle may understand
the issues differently, or he may impose different criteria on a
satisfactory reply. In the case of the question of whether passing the
Turing Test in and of itself assures that a system understands a natural
language, I think both these factors are involved.

Recall that the very purpose of the Turing Test is to establish an operational
test for intelligence, bypassing any attempt to agree on the definition of
what intelligence is, or what it means to understand a language. With the
Turing Test, we have a mathematician's attempt to bypass these sticky
questions of philosophy. It isn't surprising that a philosopher should
be unamused. To a philosopher of mind, this end run around the main
issues of the day isn't acceptable. Searle isn't satisfied with an
operational definition of intelligence because this doesn't address the
issues of subjectivity, qualia, the problem of other minds, and so
forth that are central to the human experience and constitute the core
unsolved problems of this area of philosophic study.

>	Searle tries to avoid this so-called Systems Reply by imagining yet
> another (impossible) situation, in which the person in the room memorizes all
> the rules for manipulating the symbols. His argument is nearly unbelievably
> naive: "There is nothing in the 'system' that is not in me, and since I don't
> understand Chinese, neither does the system."
>	The consequences of this statement are absurd: If his statement is
> correct, then he has proven nothing more, than that it should be possible
> for a person ignorant of Chinese to pass the Turing test for speaking
> Chinese. 

This is one of the points Searle wished to establish, that the Turing
Test is inadequate.

Searle is often accused of dualism or even mysticism, but he doesn't 
consider himself as either. If anyone is taking a leap of faith here,
it is the AI advocates. I doubt if any of them think a radio
understands speech, or a television enjoys sitcoms, or a computer reads
the email that passes through it and forms opinions on its quality. 
But we think that with the right wiring and right programs it will
suddenly become conscious and have beliefs. 

Searle doesn't deny that material entities can have such properties, but
he suggests that something in the brain is making possible these
subjective experiences which humans have, and the something that does
this, whatever it is, is quite beyond anything computer scientists have
created or proposed. 

I think he has a valid point, and I wish we could address the problems
of qualia, other minds, and the subjective experiences of humans and
other intelligent agents instead of belittling him and the issues he
raises.

--

Vic Schoenberg  	vic@Solbourne.COM
303/678-4603		...!{uunet,boulder,sun}!stan!vic