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From: kube%cogsci@.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Re: common sense
Message-ID: <8607140616.AA07717@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Mon, 14-Jul-86 02:16:27 EDT
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Posted: Mon Jul 14 02:16:27 1986
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From Newman.pasa@Xerox.COM,  AIList Digest   V4 #165:
>...All three appear
>to believe that there is some magical property of human intelligence
>(Searle and Dreyfus appear to believe that there is something special
>about the biological nature of human intelligence) which cannot be
>automated, but none can come up with a reason for why this is so.
>
>Comments?? I would particularly like to hear what you think Searle or
>Dreyfus would say to this.

Searle and Dreyfus agree that human intelligence is biological (and so
*not* magical), and in fact believe that artificial intelligences
probably can be created.  What they doubt is that a class of currently
popular techniques for attempting to produce artificial intelligence
will succeed.  Beyond this, the scope of their conclusions, and their
arguments for them, are pretty different.  They have given reasons for
their views at length in various publications, so I hesitate to post
such a short summary, but here goes:

Dreyfus has been heavily influenced by the existential
phenomenologists Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.  This stuff is extremely
dense going, but the main idea seems to be a reaction against the
Platonic or Cartesian picture of intelligent behavior as being
necessarily rational, reasoned, and rule-described.  Instead,
attention is called to the vast bulk of unreflective, fluent, adaptive
coping that constitutes most of human interaction with the world.
That the phenomenology of this kind of intelligent behavior shows it
to not be produced by reasoning about facts, or applying rules to
propositional representations, etc., and that every system designed to
produce such behavior by these means has been brittle and not
extensible, are reasons to suppose that (1) it's not done that way and
(2) it can't be done that way.  (These considerations are not intended
to apply to systems which are only rule-described at a sufficiently
subpersonal level, say at the level of weights of neuronal
interconnections.  Last I heard, Dreyfus thinks that some flavors of
connectionism might be on the right track.)

Searle, on the other hand, talks about intentional mental states
(states which have semantic content, i.e., which are `about'
something), not behavior.  His (I guess by now kind of classic)
Chinese Room argument is intended to show that no formal structure of
states of the sort required to satisfy a computational description of
a system will guarantee that any of the system's states are
intentional.  And if it's not the structure of the states that does
the trick, it's probably what the states are instanced in, viz.
neurochemistry and neurophysiology, that lends them intentionality.
So, for Searle, if you want to build an artificial agent that will not
only behave intelligently but also really have beliefs, etc., you will
probably have to wire it up out of neurons, not transistors.  (Anyway,
brains are the only kind of substance that we know of that produce
intentional states; Searle regards it as an open empirical question
whether it's possible to do it with silicon.)

Now you can think that these reasons are more or less awful, but it's
just not right to say that these guys have come up with no reasons at all.

Paul Kube
kube@berkeley.edu
...ucbvax!kube