Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!sunybcs!sher From: sher@sunybcs.uucp (David Sher) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <4307@cs.Buffalo.EDU> Date: 21 Feb 89 03:11:48 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <4296@cs.Buffalo.EDU> Sender: nobody@cs.Buffalo.EDU Reply-To: sher@wolf.UUCP (David Sher) Organization: SUNY/Buffalo Computer Science Lines: 33 In article harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes (a bunch of stuff I agree with and then): > > ... > >There is no advantage to worrying about understanding if all you are >interested in doing is making "useful tools" -- which is no doubt all >that most of AI is interested in. One wonders, though, why a >discipline with that motivation tries to push so hard on the repeatedly >discredited "Systems Reply" to Searle, insisting that "The System" DOES >understand, when the real goal is as superficial as this. Perhaps >there is a confusion here between tool-making and mind-modeling. > > [ and more stuff that seems correct ] I'd like to hazzard an answer to this question. The reason the AI establishment tries to answer this question is there is a strong implication that Searle's argument indicates that symbolic AI approaches will always lack some performance capability. In fact what he seems to be arguing is that a symbolic AI system can have any desired capability but still lack "understanding". If Searle instead argued that AI systems will never possess a soul the argument would not be so strident yet the argument is identical (at least for the definition used in Jewish theology). But the word "understanding" is almost always associated with some performance criterion, thus Searles argument in denotation is unassailable (at least by the likes of me) but has incorrect connotations. I probably blew it, being far from an expert in rhetoric, but this seems to be the nub of the problem. Does anyone believe that they can build a machine with a soul? It is just as easy to build in Searle's "understanding." -David Sher ARPA: sher@cs.buffalo.edu BITNET: sher@sunybcs UUCP: {rutgers,ames,boulder,decvax}!sunybcs!sher