Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room argument Summary: Intelligent Committees, Characters, and Robots Message-ID: Date: 9 Mar 89 17:22:08 GMT References: <15470@cup.portal.com> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 56 dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins) Portal System (TM) wrote: " I see distributed intelligences every day. The most common form is " called a committee. Another is called a bureaucracy. This is not relevant. Attributing "intelligence" in such cases is either just an analogy or a figure of speech. Can a committee feel pain? If not, then it can't understand either. " I must call attention to a widespread phenomenon among writers of " fiction.... Many authors report that the characters they invent seem to " take on 'a life of their own'... Irrelevant again. That author's have minds is not in doubt. The sources of literary creativity or social judgment are not at issue either. And certainly the minds of fictitious characters are as fictitious as the characters themselves. " All the native speakers [who are administering the Lingustic Turing " Test (LTT)] *claim that there is a native Chinese speaker in the " room*... *Without opening up the room to see what is inside*, what " basis do we have for disbelieving the native speakers? The fact of the " matter is, *we don't*. *Something* in there is understanding Chinese. " It ain't Searle; so what is it? All you are doing here is restating the premise of the LTT. Searle's Argument shows what untoward conclusions arise from accepting the premise that the LTT could be successfully passed by symbol-crunching alone. Sometimes the best way to deal with an untoward conclusion is to revise your premises. The people who are arguing till they are black and blue that "rules understand" or "chalk understands" or "Searle's brain has another mind that understands" would do better to stop straining at it and simply confront the possibility that it is not possible to pass the LTT by symbol crunching alone! By the way, although the constraint ends up doing spurious double duty, the reason Turing formulated the TT as the LTT rather than the Total (robotic) Turing Test (TTT) was not explicitly because (1) he was endorsing the symbol-crunching theory of mind, but because (2) he didn't want anyone to be biassed by the APPEARANCE of the candidate. In these Star-Wars days of loveable tin heroes, we perhaps no longer need to be so worried that robots will be denied the benefit of the doubt just because of their LOOKS. So let us consider the possibility that to pass the LTT, a candidate may need the functional wherewithal to pass the TTT, and that that functional wherewithal will not be mere symbol-crunching. Refs: Harnad, S. (1989) Minds, Machines and Searle. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 1: 5 - 25. -- 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