Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aipna!cam From: cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Searle, Strong AI, and Chinese Rooms Message-ID: <3563@aipna.ed.ac.uk> Date: 26 Nov 90 11:59:20 GMT References: <1990Nov15.204949.12075@Solbourne.COM> <27320@cs.yale.edu> Reply-To: cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) Organization: Dept of AI, Edinburgh University, UK. Lines: 39 In article mark@adler.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de (Mark Johnson) writes: > >Drew McDermott makes the interesting claim that in Searle's >Chinese Room, we wind up communicating with a "virtual person". >This raises all sorts of interesting questions, like "What is >a virtual person?", and "How is it that real people like you >and me might be able to communicate with them?" Presumably >such "virtual people" must be "instantiated" somehow on >real entities, and maybe they even need to be "connected" to >the "real world" in some way to be "real virtual people"? The analogy is with "virtual machine". Some machines have a level of description of their functioning which is independent of the technology used to implement the operations of that level. This lets you port software around different computers: you only have to re-implement the virtual machine the stuff runs on. Is there such a level of description of human mental functioning? Another way of asking that: is cognition computation? Possible answers are: 1. Impossible. 2. Well, in fact people aren't built like that, but they could be. 3. Yes. Much AI and cognitive science has presumed one of the latter two answers and is still making entertaining progress. So, if the answer is "yes", then you and I are in fact virtual people. If the answer is "well ...", then you and I are probably indistinguishable from virtual people. It's just that the concept only has theoretical interest until you find a way of breaking the thing apart at some virtual machine interface. -- Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.aipna 031 667 1011 x2550 Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK