Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!lee
From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Sci. American AI debate
Message-ID: <6039@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 5 Jan 90 13:11:12 GMT
References: <16587@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 19

Searle's argument does not make much sense to me, as stated.  For one
thing, I don't agree with any of his axioms.  But I think there is a
related issue, very familiar to programmers, that might help to identify
the intuitive content of the argument.  That is the issue of modularity.
Recall the difficulty people have had in running some programs written
for the ibmpc on clones, due to the programs' direct manipulation of the
display.  For such cases, there are direct dependencies between the
higher level parts of the program + operating system and low level parts
-- the hardware peripherals.  One could perhaps say, using Searle's
language, that these ill-structured programs contain symbols with
intrinsic semantic content, or that the hardware displays "causal
powers" with respect to program behavior.

Under this reinterpretation, Searle's argument becomes the conjecture
that the human mind/brain is ill-structured.  The mind-program could not
be run with different hardware peripherals.  But although this could
turn out to be true, it is not logically true.

				Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu