From: utzoo!watmath!cbostrum
Newsgroups: net.general
Title: Re: Refutation of the Turing Test
Article-I.D.: watmath.3944
Posted: Sat Nov 27 02:40:05 1982
Received: Sat Nov 27 04:40:03 1982

The author of the article mentioned in the title of this response
is really referring to John R. Searle of UCB and his infamous "Chinese
Room" argument against what he calls "strong AI". The paper
where he presents this argument can be found in Mind Design, edited
by John Haugeland; its title is "Minds, Brains, and Programs". It
can also be found in a recent issue of the Behavioural and Brain Sciences
Journal, along with commentaries from many others in the field. Many
of these commentaries are absolutely devastating to Searle's argument,
which, frankly, is astonishing naive for a philosopher of his repute.
If I recall, Haugeland's response itself was a particularly good one.
One final place to look for this paper is The Minds I, ed. Daniel
Dennett et. al. There is some commentary there as well.

The basic flaw in the argument is of course that it is **not** the man
who is manipulating the symbols to whom the comprehension of Chinese
is being attributed, but rather the entire system itself. It is roughly
the same mistake as saying that our brain (or some other suitably chosen
part of us) understands english, rather than we ourselves.
Haugeland compares the man running around pushing symbols on little pieces
of paper and eventually dropping one such piece out a slot to the nueral
pathways in our brains passing "messages" about; and surely we do not wish
to say that these pathways understand english. But this is essentially what
Searle is trying to get us to believe.

Although I dont believe Searle's argument serves in any way as a refutation
of the Turing test, I do believe that the Turing test is not what its
cracked up to be. Comments and discussion on this issue would be quite
interesting, I think.