Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Searle's response to the systems reply Summary: Ideological Grippe Message-ID: Date: 24 Feb 89 04:05:06 GMT References: <9713@ihlpb.ATT.COM> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 88 This is a reply to two successive postings by arm@ihlpb.ATT.COM (A. R. Macalalad) of AT&T Bell Laboratories, who wrote: " Now for the sake of argument, let's assume that there is a " distinction between Searle and (Searle + rules)... the only entity able " to decide if (Searle + rules) really understands Chinese is (Searle + " rules). Not you or me or any outside observers or even Searle himself. " Only (Searle + rules). Of course, if we are assuming that much for the sake of argument -- namely, a separate entity that exists and understands -- then of course there is no argument. You've assumed it all. " The issue I now want to take up is your justification of the " Total Turing Test... [tap-dancing, etc.]... The justification for the Total (robotic) Turing Test (TTT) in preference to the Language-In/Language-Out Turing Test (LTT) is fourfold (and has nothing to do with arbitrary calls for tap-dancing): (1) The TTT is what we already use with one another in our everyday, practical "solutions" to the other-minds problem -- not the LTT, which we only use, derivatively, with pen-pals. (2) The TTT (fine-tuned eventually to include neuronal "behavior" too) encompasses all the available empirical data for the mind-modeler. (The only other data are subjective data, and I advocate methodological epiphenomenalism with respect to those.) The LTT, on the other hand, is just an arbitrary subset of the available empirical data. (3) The LTT, consisting of symbols in and symbols out, is open to a systematic ambiguity about whether or not everything that goes on in between could be just symbolic too. (I conjecture that the LTT couldn't be passed by a device that couldn't also pass the TTT, and that a large portion of the requisite underlying function will be nonsymbolic.) (4) Evolution, the symbol grounding problem, and common sense all suggest that robotic (TTT) capacities precede linguistic (LTT) capacities and that the latter are grounded in the former. " Of course, if you'd rather offer an objective definition of... " understanding, please feel free.... As stated many, many times in this discussion, and never confronted or rebutted by anyone, this is not a definitional matter: I know whether or not I understand a language without any need to define anything. " Conduct on the net... I think that a few other apologies are due. I'm trying to criticize views and arguments, not people. If I have offended anyone, I sincerely apologize. (It seems not that long ago that *I* was the one preaching against intemperate and ad hominem postings on the Net as not only ethically reprehensible but an obstacle to the Net's realizing its full Platonic potential as a medium of scholarly communication.) " Being one of those "in the grip of an ideology," I find it remarkably " easy to recognize two systems, and Searle's reply of "internalizing" " the second system only clouds the issue... for true internalization to " take place, the rules must be converted from one system to the other. " In other words, the person has to just sit down and learn Chinese.... One of the tell-tale symptoms of being in the grip of an ideology is that one can no longer tell when one is begging the question... " Let's take a variation of the Chinese room where the purpose of the " room is to interpret [Chinese] BASIC instead of to understand " Chinese... Is it fair to conclude, then, that the system of the person " in the Chinese BASIC room and her bits of paper is not really " interpreting BASIC?... Now who's in the grip of whose ideology? The suspicious reader who might think I stacked the cards by clipping out the ARGUMENTS in pasting together the above excerpt will be surprised to see, upon reading the entire original posting, that there ARE no arguments: The Chinese Room has simply been reformulated in Chinese Basic, and voila! (There's also a double-entendre here on the syntactic vs. the mentalistic meaning of "interpret.") Mere repetition of credos is yet another symptom of ideological grippe. -- Stevan Harnad INTERNET: harnad@confidence.princeton.edu harnad@princeton.edu srh@flash.bellcore.com harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu harnad@princeton.uucp BITNET: harnad@pucc.bitnet CSNET: harnad%princeton.edu@relay.cs.net (609)-921-7771