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From: cmiller@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Chris Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Sci. American AI debate
Message-ID: <52471@srcsip.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jan 90 15:41:16 GMT
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In-reply-to: kpfleger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU's message of 4 Jan 90 23:07:12 GMT

>From: kpfleger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Karl Robert Pfleger)

>  My reaction to reading the Searle article was exactly identical to
>  reading his earlier paper, Minds, brains, and programs, _Behavioral and
>  Brain Sciences_, 1980. He's just arguing semantics. His whole point is
>  about definitions, and as pointed out above, he never provides any. The

It's nice to see my basic feelings about this issue finally getting some
airplay in this thread.

Perhaps it's merely my background in cognitive psychology, but I find the
whole question 'can computers think?' to be a subtle bit of misdirection.
I believe that this whole debate (both on the net and in general) is
actually an attempt to define the term "thought" (and related terms like
"understand", "know", "mean", etc.)  It may be more accurate to claim that
this is a battle for the right to apply the term "thought" to a new
process(es) which, although it certainly differs from the one classically
called "thought", may or may not do so in a way which "makes a difference."

For millenia, it has been sufficient to allow the word "thought" to denote
nothing much more complicated or well-defined than "that activity which
humans engage in while scratching their heads."  The various fields of AI
are now providing candidate refinements to that definition in the form of
process models.  These models are held up with the claim "See, this is
THINKING."

Searle (and others) are saying "No, that is not THINKING.  THINKING is
something different."  But they have not yet, to my satisfaction, either
spelled out what that difference is, or provided an alternate definition of
"thinking" which makes it clear.  I am not necessarily opposed to the idea
that "thinking" IS different, I just don't see HOW, yet.

Thus, this argument is less about what computers can or cannot do, and more
about definitions and semantics and, especially, the awarding of labels.
If AI programs cannot "think," then perhaps we need some new verb to
describe what it is that they do and how this process differs from both
traditional, algorithmic "computing", and human "thinking".

Curiously, I think a similar situation arose during the early and middle
parts of this century in linguistics over the question of what constituted
"language", "communication," and "meaning."  It had sort of always been
assumed that "language" was something that humans alone did, but the
discovery of symbolic communications between honeybees and especially the
experiments in sign language with chimps threw this contention into
question.  The debate gradually led to a much more specific definition of
"language" which largely took these border cases into account and served to
practically distinguish what humans did from what these animals did. 

I'm fuzzy on this stuff.  Perhaps someone who knows it better can
elaborate.

--Chris