Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.llnl.gov!ncis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!bionet!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!itsgw!batcomputer!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!ap1i+ From: ap1i+@andrew.cmu.edu (Andrew C. Plotkin) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: elementary AI philosophy Message-ID: Date: 18 Jan 89 00:14:31 GMT References: <18464@santra.UUCP> <1241@arctic.nprdc.arpa>, <904@ubu.warwick.UUCP> Organization: Carnegie Mellon Lines: 37 In-Reply-To: <904@ubu.warwick.UUCP> mirk@warwick.UUCP (Mike Taylor) writes... />Roughly, you assumed that there exists some "essential element />of minds" and that "humans have" some essence which makes them />fundamentally "different from machines." as you show in the next />few sentences you're fishing for some "essence" more akin to a "soul", />something that would in fact separate MEN from BEASTS. / / I am not at all sure that the original poster mightn't have a point here. / I assume that most of you are familiar with Chris Searle's intriguing / "Chinese Room" objection to the claim of "Strong AI": In a nutshell, that / a human could hand-simulate any putative AI program without gaining any / *understanding* of the supposedly cognitive acts involved. Searle / concludes from this that we have no evidence to assume that the program / itself, when running on a computer "understands" as such, (leaving aside / for now the perrenial problem of exactly what we mean by "undestand"). / / As far as this goes, I am forced to accept Searle's argument - the replies / which he attempts to refute in his article "Minds, Brains and Program" seem / to me to be dealt with fairly adroitly by him. But Searle then seems to / lack the courage of his convictions, and instead of adopting the "soulist" / point of view, which seems to me to follow fairly naturally from the / "Chinese Room" thought-experiment, he adopts the rather startling position / of believing that there is somehow something magical about the neural / substrate... A refutation to Searle's refutation is that, in his scenario (a human doing AI algorithms, by hand, from a big set of rules) the human is necessarily a very small part of the system. The rules containing the algorithms will contain immense amounts of data. Therefore, while the human has no understanding of the cognitive actions, the complete system might. (How can a human-plus-inanimate-objects have understanding that the human alone does not? I think this is the basic difference in opinion between the soulist and non-soulist position. But Searle's scenario only underlines it, rather than resolving it.) --Z