Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!elroy!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!venera.isi.edu!smoliar
From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: letter to THE NEW YORK REVIEW concerning AI
Keywords: Searle, Chinese room, Minsky
Message-ID: <7471@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 8 Feb 89 19:18:20 GMT
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 94



                                       February 8, 1989







New York Review
250 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10107



To whom it may concern,
The  exchange over "Artificial Intelligence and the Chinese Room"
in  the  February  16,  1989  New  York  Review   was   a   great
disappointment,  since  on  the  basis of the published texts, it
would appear that neither Elhanan  Motzkin  nor  respondent  John
Searle  was  writing  from a position of experience in artificial
intelligence.    Fortunately,  Searle  was  good  enough  to  set
straight  most  of  Motzkin's  naive understanding of the work of
Alan Turing, not to mention the  fact  that  Motzkin  missed  the
whole point of the original Chinese room argument.  However, this
left Searle with the last word, so that the point  he  wanted  to
make appeared to remain standing soundly:

    .  .  .  a digital computer is a device which manipulates
    symbols,  without  any  reference  to  their  meaning  or
    interpretation.    Human  beings, on the other hand, when
    they think, do something much more than that.    A  human
    mind   has  meaningful  thoughts,  feelings,  and  mental
    contents generally.  Formal  symbols  by  themselves  can
    never be enough for mental contents, because the symbols,
    by definition, have no  meaning  (or  interpretation,  or
    semantics)  except  insofar as someone outside the system
    gives it to them.


     This argument first appeared in 1980, in the article "Minds,
Brains,  and  Programs" in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences; and
as recently as November 17, 1988, Searle espoused essentially the
same  view  in  a lecture at UCLA.  However, a good deal has been
achieved in the study of mind over these intervening eight years,
making  it worth while to enquire as to whether Searle's argument
has weathered the progress of more recent insights.  Most notable
is  the observation that the recent contribution of Marvin Minsky
in The Society of Mind has not  prompted  Searle  into  at  least
minor revisions of his arguments.

     One  of  the  most  difficult  obstacles to trying to reason
through Searle's logic is his tendency to play  rather  fast  and
loose  with  words  like  "understanding"  and  "knows."    Thus,
assuming himself to be  the  symbol-processing  man  manipulating
Chinese  symbols  in  a convincing manner, he is still willing to
state baldly, "It is just a plain fact about me  that  I  do  not
understand  Chinese."    This  "plain  fact,"  however,  might be
questioned in light of two other (hopefully sounder) plain facts:
First,   Searle  is  never  willing  to  say  enough  about  what
constitutes understanding to support why he  should  come  to  so
obvious  a  conclusion.    Second, because he dodges the issue of
understanding, he does  not  seem  willing  to  acknowledge  that
introspection  may  ultimately  be  a  very  poor  judge  of  his
understanding.  If some body of native Chinese speakers  are  all
willing to acknowledge that he understands Chinese, regardless of
the specific means for exhibiting his convincing behavior, who is
he  to  argue on the basis of his potentially deceptive powers of
introspection?

     Minsky, on the other hand, is less inclined  to  legerdemain
with  highly  charged  words.  (Indeed, one of the more memorable
aphorisms from The Society of Mind is:    "Words  should  be  our
servants, not our masters."  [7.9]) Thus, he is able to develop a
"working definition" of understanding  based  on  an  ability  to
discriminate  differences  (this  is in Chapter 23); and there is
nothing about this definition which would deny  that  Searle,  or
anyone  else  in  his  Chinese  room,  is  actually understanding
Chinese.  Now the point of this argument is not  to  assert  that
Minsky  is  right  and  Searle is wrong.  Rather, it is simply to
observe that much of Searle's argument rests on  claims  that  he
wishes  to  pass  off  as  obvious.    There  seems  to be enough
potentially contrary  evidence  to  indicate  that,  while  these
observations  may  be  obvious  to  Searle, he ought to draw upon
sounder forms of argument to convince the rest of us.



                                       Sincerely,



                                       Stephen W. Smoliar