Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!att!ihlpb!arm From: arm@ihlpb.ATT.COM (Macalalad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <9763@ihlpb.ATT.COM> Date: 2 Mar 89 17:46:10 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <9679@ihlpb.ATT.COM> Reply-To: arm@ihlpb.UUCP (55528-Macalalad,A.R.) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois Lines: 81 In article harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes: >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. Stevan, no one is disputing whether or not you know whether you understand a language, least of all me. Maybe my argument wasn't too clear, so let me try to clarity things. Argument: In order to come to any resolution about what systems can or cannot understand, we need an objective theory of understanding, rather than the behaviorist "I'll know it when I see it" tests such as the Linguistic Turing Test (LTT) or the Total Turing Test (TTT). Now you may be totally confident that you know when you understand a language, but to conclude that you know when another entity understands a language is a leap that I'm not quite ready to make. The problem I have, of course, is the Other Minds Problem, which roughly stated is the problem of knowing for certain whether other entities understand/comprehend/are conscious/etc. Descartes had God, and you have your Total Turing Test, neither of which are truly satisfactory to me (although I do have faith in God :-). As I understand it, TTT merely involves applying our practical solution of the other minds problem to AI systems. In other words, TTT says, "I'm not going to define how a system understands a language, but I'll know it when I see it." Meanwhile, I can turn around and say, "It sure acts like it understands, but look at the underlying architecture. It's a machine, and MACHINES CANNOT UNDERSTAND. (or it's a formal system, or it's non-biological, or it's only a simulation, or any other hokey excuse) Now we're at a standoff, where one believes that the given system does understand because it passed the TTT, and the other other just as firmly believes that it does not understand because the underlying architecture is incapable of believing. All because of the refusal to commit to a definition. Both camps hold different common sense notions of understanding, one based more on behavior and the other based more on underlying architecture. Both are practical solutions to the other minds problem, and both predict different things for this one solution. Which one is right? >(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. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't include neuronal behavior in any of my practical solutions to the other minds problem. And how can you make sense out of such data without having some theory of understanding, besides our intuitive, subjective ones? I know that I don't have any meaningful intuitions about neuronal behavior. Could it be that maybe deep down inside, you might think that a theory of understanding would be useful? And maybe there is in fact a definitional issue in here after all? >" 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. Thank you for pointing out that Searle (and I) aren't really arguing here, but merely following different ideologies to different conclusions. As for the double meaning of "interpret," I'll take the "practical" meaning: "*Interpreting BASIC* means *Running my program* and I'll know it when I see it." :-) -Alex