Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mailrus!cornell!oravax!daryl
From: daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Sci. American AI debate: No Contest
Summary: Why can't a single physical system produce more than one mind?
Keywords: Searle Churchland Speed
Message-ID: <1221@oravax.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jan 90 16:09:32 GMT
References: <12679@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca NY
Lines: 64

In article <12679@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
(Stevan Harnad) writes:

> [...stuff deleted...]
> By the way, in endorsing the systems reply in principle, as you do
> (apparently only because of its counterintuitiveness, and the fact that
> other counterintuitive things have, in the history of science, turned
> out to be correct after all), you leave out Searle's very apt RESPONSE
> to the counterintuitive idea that the "system" consisting of him plus
> the room and its contents might still be understanding even if he
> himself is not: He memorizes the rules, and henceforth he IS all there
> is to the system, yet still he doesn't understand Chinese.

> (And I hope
> you won't rejoin with the naive hackers' multiple-personality gambit at
> this point, which is CLEARLY wanting to save the original hypothesis at
> any counterfactual price: There is no reason whatsoever to believe that
> simply memorizing a bunch of symbols and symbol manipulation rules and
> then executing them is one of the etiologies of multiple personality
> disorder!)
> [...stuff deleted...]

Stevan, I'm not surprised thatt you hope they don't bring up the
"multiple-personality gambit", since (it seems to me) it makes a
shambles of Searle's argument.

Consider my version of the strong AI claim:
A mind is a process, produced by executing a program.

It is obvious that a single physical system (a computer) can execute
more than one program simultaneously, so a consequence of my version
of strong AI is that a physical system, such as a brain, can
simultaneously be associated with more than one mind. If Searle
memorizes the Chinese room rules, then according to strong AI, he is
producing a Chinese mind, in addition to his "normal" mind. When you ask
him if he understands Chinese, you receive the correct answer from his
normal mind; the normal Searle *doesn't* understand Chinese. That doesn't
prove that there is not a second mind associated with the physical system
of Searle plus rules which does understand Chinese.

The argument that the "multiple-personality" (or, rather,
multiple-mind) idea is naive is no argument. If the articles by Searle
and the Churchlands in Scientific American represent the best and
wisest thoughts on the subject, then the whole area has simply not
progressed beyond the naive stage.

The argument that
> There is no reason whatsoever to believe that
> simply memorizing a bunch of symbols and symbol manipulation rules and
> then executing them is one of the etiologies of multiple personality
> disorder!  carries no weight with respect to Searle's position.
Searle's claim in the Scientific American article is that the strong
AI position could be proven false by his Chinese room thought
experiment. To attack Searle's position it is not necessary to give
any evidence in favor of strong AI; it is only necessary that Searle's
argument has holes in it, that he has not proved strong AI to be
impossible. In order for Searle to claim that he has "disproved"
strong AI, he either must come up with a set of definitions and axioms
that everyone can agree with, and show that the falsity of strong AI
is a logical consequence of those definitions and axioms, or he must
by exhaustion answer every objection (naive or not, supported by
evidence or not) to his "proof".

Daryl McCullough