Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: letter to THE NEW YORK REVIEW concerning AI Keywords: Searle, Chinese room, Minsky Message-ID: <208@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 24 Feb 89 16:59:34 GMT References: <7471@venera.isi.edu> <7551@venera.isi.edu> Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 46 I don't always agree with Stevan Harnard, but this time I do. It's easy to attack Searle's arguments with a behaviorist insistence that "only the behaviour maters" or that "consciousness" is a "myth" (after all, how can you prove to someone else that your consciousness makes a difference?), and easy to try to put the burden of proof on the other guy by demanding "objective evidence" and "definitions". This may be effective in debate, since hard evidence is always more immediately convincing ("seeing is believing"), but doesn't really settle the issue. I'm sometimes reminded of an old joke: Two behaviorists meet in the morning, and one says to the other, "you're fine, how am I?" Now, the behaviorist attitude can be OK. Perhaps you just care about about getting intelligent behavior and think questions of "understanding" are a waste of time. Well, no one says you have to care about such questions, but there may still be some interest there for someone else. You might say that if subjectivity makes a difference it should show up in behavior somewhere. Well, maybe it does. But we certainly don't know enough now to say where. After all, we just don't know how far we can get by considering the behavior alone. And the best time to ask whether machines understand may be after we have some machines with intelligent behavior, not now when we don't know much of anything about what such machines will be like. What does Searle's argument actually show? Suppose we have Searle, and he's internalized all the instructions for answering questions in Chinese, and he's actually able to answer such questions. Searle then says that he does not understand Chinese. I think it's pretty clear what he means. Consider the difference between what you do when replying to a question in a language you understand and Searle, who would be going through some complicated procedure to produce an answer, which still means nothing to him, but which turns out to make sense to someone who knows Chinese. Perhaps this all becomes pretty much automatic, so that Searle can do it quickly. But he still can't say in English what his answers mean -- he has to ask someone who knows Chinese. I don't think we need a precise definition of "understanding" to see that there's a difference here. We don't even need to decide if this difference involves "understanding" or some other thing that should be called something else. But what's happened, in effect, is that Searle's brain is now running a program that answers Chinese questions. Searle may not understand Chinese, but for all we know his running of the program amounts to having a separate entity inside him that does.