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From: harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Re: Searle, Turing, Symbols, Categories
Message-ID: <8610271729.AA12628@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Sun, 26-Oct-86 15:56:29 EST
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Posted: Sun Oct 26 15:56:29 1986
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freeman@spar.UUCP (Jay Freeman) replies:

>       Possibly a more interesting test [than the robotic version of
>       the Total Turing Test] would be to give the computer
>       direct control of the video bit map and let it synthesize an
>       image of a human being.

Manipulating digital "images" is still only symbol-manipulation. It is
(1) the causal connection of the transducers with the objects of the
outside world, including (2) any physical "resemblance" the energy
pattern on the transducers may have to the objects from which they
originate, that distinguishes robotic functionalism from symbolic
functionalism and that suggests a solution to the problem of grounding
the otherwise ungrounded symbols (i.e., the problem of "intrinsic vs.
derived intentionality"), as argued in the papers under discussion.

A third reason why internally manipulated bit-maps are not a new way
out of the problems with the symbolic version of the turing test is
that (3) a model that tries to explain the functional basis of our
total performance capacity already has its hands full with anticipating
and generating all of our response capacities in the face of any
potential input contingency (i.e., passing the Total Turing Test)
without having to anticipate and generate all the input contingencies
themselves. In other words, its enough of a problem to model the mind
and how it interacts successfully with the world without having to
model the world too.

Stevan Harnad
{seismo, packard, allegra} !princeton!mind!harnad
harnad%mind@princeton.csnet
(609)-921-7771