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From: PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Mental states of machines
Message-ID: <14369@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 3-Dec-83 03:42:50 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.14369
Posted: Sat Dec  3 03:42:50 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Dec-83 06:40:36 EST
Lines: 28

Steven Gutfreund's criticism of John McCarthy is unjustified.  I
haven't read the article in "Psychology Today", but I am familiar with
the notion put forward by JMC and condemned by SG.  The question can
be put in simple terms: is it useful to attribute mental states and
attitudes to machines? The answer is that our terms for mental states
and attitudes ("believe", "desire", "expect", etc...) represent a
classification of possible relationships between world states and the
internal (inacessible) states of designated individuals. Now, for
simple individuals and worlds, for example small finite automata, it
is possible to classify the world-individual relationships with simple
and tractable predicates. For more complicated systems, however, the
language of mental states is likely to become essential, because the
classifications it provides may well be computationally tractable in
ways that other classifications are not. Remember that individuals of
any "intelligence" must have states that encode classifications of
their own states and those of other individuals. Computational
representations of the language of mental states seem to be the only
means we have to construct machines with such rich sets of states that
can operate in "rational" ways with respect to the world and other
individuals.

SG's comment is analogous to the following criticism of our use of the
terms like "execution", "wait" or "active" when talking about the
states of computers: "it is wrong to use such terms when we all know
that what is down there is just a finite state machine, which we
understand so well mathematically."

Fernando Pereira