Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert
From: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument
Message-ID: <2563@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Mar 89 13:16:50 GMT
References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <Feb.18.17.26.17.1989.23438@elbereth.rutgers.edu> <8174@netnews.upenn.edu> <Feb.19.14.23.34.1989.8773@elbereth.rutgers.edu> <51123@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <2483@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <52507@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton)
Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland
Lines: 43

In article <52507@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> engelson@cs.yale.edu (Sean Engelson) writes:
>But a physicist can give me a simple and effective procedure by which
>I can measure the charge of a body, or the force of gravity.  I have
>seen no such procedure of criterion for recognising understanding,
>other than I/O equivalence with that which we call understanding in
>humans.  Under that criterion, the Chinese Room understands.

You have seen ....

Have you looked?

"Verstehen" lies at the heart of hermeneutics and several other
intellectual traditions.  Unfortunately, you come across as a naive
positivist, so I doubt whether you would get anything from Dilthey,
later hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, Malinowski,
ethnomethodology or social action theory (to start near to home and
thus in your own language).

I/O equivalence is the sense-data argument, you're nearly 60 years
behind the times.  This got taken to its extreme and fell apart in the
1930s with some of the Vienna crowd.

Wittgenstein is an easy place to start too.  Have a look at his notion
of family resemblance (for games, chairs etc.).  You'll see that many
of the meanings which you take for granted aren't as hard as you'd want
them to be.  I believe that some ongoing physics experiments in
Nevada/near also are casting doubts on our ideas about gravity too.
Physicsis getting a lot looser than it used to be, just look at how
long physicists will argue over a cat in a box.  Hardly good practical
empirical experiment like you brave AI boys.

Understanding is attributed during practice.  Perhaps a TTT could pass
it, but I doubt it, as no-one's going to get enough encoded to simulate
anything near the common sense repetoire of humans.

Finally, the TTT cannot be like the LTT, in the missionary position and
one to one.  The real TTT's going to have to be public, communal and
involve more than one task.  I can't see why anyone is bothered about
believing whether this is possible "in theory" as there is as yet no
possible theory in which it could be true.
-- 
Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science,  The University, Glasgow
	gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs <europe>!ukc!glasgow!gilbert