Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cs.dal.ca!ug.cs.dal.ca!robertso From: robertso@ug.cs.dal.ca Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Sci. American AI debate: No Contest Keywords: Searle Churchland Speed Hard-core-Searlean Message-ID: <1990Jan9.064320.2131@ug.cs.dal.ca> Date: 9 Jan 90 06:43:20 GMT References: <12679@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <18053@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> <11274@venera.isi.edu> Reply-To: robertso@ug.cs.dal.ca.UUCP () Organization: Math, Stats & CS, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada Lines: 87 In article <11274@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) writes: >In article <18053@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU> hougen@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Dean Hougen) >writes: >> . . . But instead I got someone who >>would rather joke about Searle's opponents than to discuss rationally their >>or Searle's positions. > >It should come as no surprise that Searle, himself, behaved pretty much the >same way when he led a seminar at UCLA last year. . . I'll second that! I saw Searle giving essentially this very paper at Concordia University a few years ago. At the time I was enrolled in a Philosophy of Mind course at McGill which was taught by a guy named Charles Travis, a classmate of Searle's from Berkely. So naturally, I went expecting at least some good food for philosophical thought. Instead, what I saw was Bob Hope meets Wittgenstein - a smattering of philosophical allusion bolstered by much irrelevant humour when the going actually got rough. Speaking of Wittgenstein, . . . [Searle's argument trades on attributing certain semantic properties to the word "understanding" which are unintuitive and/or unsupported. >Wittgenstein's] PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS was devoted to questioning whether >or not those properties could be applied to a denotation of the word >"game." If we can't get out of the woods with an apparently simple >word like "game," are we not a bit arrogant to assume that we have >a grasp on a word like "understanding?" Wittgenstein's target, in both the family resemblance and private language arguments, was a long standing philosophical tradition to the effect that ALL bits of language admit to a (simple enough to be useful) semantic reduction - Empirical Positivism. Wittgenstein offered a radically different view of how we come to acquire language, and so also of what we, as the one's who USE it, can say ABOUT it (especially about MENTAL terms, like "understanding"). I would be the first to cite these arguments in support of the idea that machines, that is artifices, can (in principle) think, at least as well as we can digest pizza. (A small taste of Searle's desperate wit). But Wittgenstein did NOT question that we can and do reliably USE linguistic terms. Just Because they don't lend themselves to criterial analyses does not imply that we don't "know what they mean", at least insofar as we seem to communicate adequately with them (albeit after much effort, at times...). That is why Searle can indeed help himself to the term "understanding" without defining it. Of course, if he implicitly uses it as having semantic properties which no one else thinks it does, as is charged, then he still has to give a good defense of his analysis of the term (which he doesn't). I think that the best way to get at Searle's dubious assumptions about certain mental predicates is not to demonstrate how they don't fit well with the human evidence, but instead to reveal how they don't fit any BETTER with the MACHINE evidence than several alternatives might. It seems that Searle designed his Chinese Room with the following target in mind: Anyone who thinks that a computer could ever think or understand anything must be committed to maintaining that it is the computer's CPU which is doing the thinking, or understanding, or whatever. Advances in PDP architectures provided the first hint that, yes, although a Turing Machine can emulate anything, that does not mean that its SYNTACTIC components, ie., tape states (or transistor states), are SEMANTICALLY interpretable as having the same macro-properties as that which it computes. Does that mean that the room as a whole knows Chinese? Well, it sounds pretty absurd to me. Rooms don't know anything, right? (See? We can discard BLATANT abuses of language without an accurate analysis to back us up. We just have to agree that they sound stupid.) But that doesn't mean that the only alternative is to presume that a computer and its CPU are semantically indistinguishable. Here I think that the details of the case are too simplistic to even give an "in principle" representation of exactly what is at issue. In short, Searle's argument, if we are to interpret it charitably as being one, succeeds quite well in discrediting a certain philosophical stance towards machines - but it is a stance that is far from monopolizing current research, and one which I hope is not to widespread among those of us who would love to make, among other things, a machine that could speak Chinese. ================= - Chris Robertson Don't look back. You may trip and hit your head.