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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, Strong AI, and Chinese Rooms
Message-ID: <15798@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 26 Nov 90 22:32:10 GMT
References: <1990Nov15.204949.12075@Solbourne.COM> <1990Nov19.191925.28285@cs.umn.edu>
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Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
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In article <1990Nov19.191925.28285@cs.umn.edu> thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H.
Thornley) writes:
>
>Frankly, Alan Turing didn't write his little paper to amuse philosophers.
>He was trying to come up with an operational definition that people could
>use, if and when anybody declared that a machine was intelligent.
>
Having now read several of David's contributions, I am not about to accuse him
of not having read "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."  He knows enough of
the details of the story to convince me that he has read the paper at least
once, if not several times.  However, the above paragraph indicates, to me
at least, that he may not have received Turing's message.  Therefore, I would
like to try to clear up a couple of points.

First of all, for those who do not know this already, Turing's "little paper"
was published in MIND.  He may not have been interested in amusing
philosophers, but he certainly considered them the primary audience
for his observations.  (Remember that Turing spent quite a few hours
in discussion with Wittgenstein during his Cambridge days, so his thoughts
about mind date back to before his work on breaking codes or building computing
machines.)

A more important point, however, is that nowhere in this paper does Turing talk
about operational definitions.  He begins with the question, "Can machines
think?"  The first thing he does is dismiss this question on the grounds that
it bites off more than any sensible thinker can chew.  THEN he poses the
scenario of the "imitation game."  The purpose of posing the scenario is
to ask whether or not a machine could play it.  He argues that this question
is more tractable than his original question and then proceeds to discuss how
one might ultimately build such a machine.

Thus, we are now quite some distance from anything remotely resembling any sort
of definition (operational or otherwise) for intelligence.  Unfortunately,
there now seems to be a flood of philosophers of mind who want to read more
into Turing's paper than he ever intended to write.  The "imitation game" was
nothing more than an engineering decision to pull thought away from (possibly)
fruitless speculation and direct it towards something more concrete.  Of
course, many of us have anecdotes about how some implementation of ELIZA
managed to play the "imitation game" successfully.  All this means is that
we have probably now come far enough to think about scenarios more
sophisticated than Turing's original suggestion.  This seems like
an excellent thing to do.  Turing introduced the "imitation game"
to discourage philosophers from idle speculation.  Those philosophers
now seem to be rushing back to those nebulous words like "think" and
"intelligence" again.  All this means is that it is time to invent a
new scenario, more challenging than the imitation game, which can allow
us to return to more concrete issues again.

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