Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!radford Newsgroups: comp.ai From: radford@ai.toronto.edu (Radford Neal) Subject: Re: Chinese Room by Shannon and McCarthy from 1956 Message-ID: <90Feb7.120434est.6602@neat.cs.toronto.edu> Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto References: <2891@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <2903@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <10599@june.cs.washington.edu> <14266@cs.yale.edu> <5319@star.cs.vu.nl> Date: 7 Feb 90 17:05:05 GMT Lines: 37 In article <5319@star.cs.vu.nl> xerox@cs.vu.nl (J. A. Durieux) writes: > I think one has to have thought about [ Searle's ] points of view before > in order to have them "resonate", and to understand them. (I don't > feel able to state them better, by the way.) ... > My opinion is, that behaviour has simply a too small bandwidth to > be able to distinguish understanding and not-understanding > systems *in principle*... The problem with this argument is that it is too powerful. If you accept it, you must also abandon any beliefs you may have that _other people_ have minds. I've tried to understand the Chinese Room argument, and failed. It seems to be based on a simple refusal to understand basic technical and/or philosophical points. This may seem implausible, given that Searle is supposedly competent, but I have no better hypothesis. The topic seems to induce nonsense all around, as with the "refutation" that conventional programs can't understand, but neural networks might. Let us suppose that a machine is constructed that can at least mimic all human intellectual and emotional behaviour. Whether this is possible is an empirical question, but Searle appears willing to hypothesize that it is. Will people consider the machine to be a "person", endowed with attributes such as intelligence and morality? This too is an empirical question. If they've had long conversations with it, heard it describe its hopes and fears, had it help them with their personal problems, etc. I think most people would consider it a person, but some might not, if they knew how it was implemented. Finally, one might ask whether one _should_ consider it a person. This is a moral question, similar to that of whether one should consider members of other races to be people. There is nothing logically inconsistent in Searle answering this question in the negative, but once it is seen in this light, the argument looses all force for those who do not share his prejudices. Radford Neal