Xref: utzoo comp.ai:6043 talk.philosophy.misc:3624 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!usc!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc Subject: Re: Why the Chinese Room doesn't convince Summary: decomposing the world Message-ID: <11965@venera.isi.edu> Date: 21 Feb 90 15:12:55 GMT Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 73 In article kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes: > >I would deny that the interrelationship of semantics with more general >cognitive features makes it either impossible or unproductive to define >semantics in isolation from the rest of cognition. I see the situation >of semantics as similar to knowledge representation, motor control, or >syntactic competence. We should analyze them separately at first, then >consider the interfaces, and proceed from there to a full system. It's >OK, of course, to work in parallel on all these, just don't rule out the >serial approach. > Ken, I think you have put your finger on the heart of our disagreement; and while I try to be careful about getting too extreme with words like "impossible" and "unproductive," it certainly WAS my intention to introduce a cautionary remark about your approach. Perhaps another way of putting it is that, believe it or not, I, too, am trying to sort things out; however, we see different "things" as being fundamental. Let me see if I can capture the distinction in a manner upon which we can agree. The impression I get is that your fundamental concern is with employing appropriate forms of symbol systems as abstractions for natural systems. Thus, you list systems such as semantics, knowledge representation, motor control, and syntactic competence and advocate that abstractions for each of these systems may be developed in relative isolation as long as one recognizes the need for appropriate interfaces. This is, essentialy, a good, healthy, modular approach to software development. The reason I am questioning what would appear, to most of our readers, to be almost absolute motherhood actually stems from personal experiences in software development. One of the lessons I have learned is that the modular approach generally works best if you already know what the modules are! (I've always felt this is the most important justification from Brooks' adage to "build one to throw away." Only after you've built the "first draft" do you begin to develop a suitable intuition for what it is REALLY made out of.) With regard to the discussion at hand, I am prepared to argue that we are still so far from implementing intelligent behavior that any attempt to approach it in terms of modules (even modules which carry all the weight of tradition in logic, linguistics, and philosophy) MAY (note that I shall not stick my neck out with "will") mislead us. Another way of putting all this is that, even if you think you have identified a viable set of modules, you may still not be able to avoid a rather high bandwidth of communication across your interfaces. This means that the progress you can make in studying any one module in isolation will be severely limited. (This is not to say "unproductive;" but it will be productive to the extent that you are aware of the limitations.) In the case of language, we see the extent of such complex interactions as early as Terry Winograd's pioneering work. One of the reasons he built his system on a procedural representation of knowledge was to establish a better handle on all those interactions. In conclusion, I do not think the issue is one of whether or not we take a serial or parallel approach. What is important is that, if we try to build a model, we should try to build one large enough to accommodate some corpus of intelligent behavior. Part of the trick is defining such a corpus with a scope small enough to admit of implementation but broad enough to be interesting. Chinese rooms are clearly beyond that scope level. Rather than wax philosophical about how they might turn out, we should look for some form of behavior on a more manageable scale. Then we can assess whether or not such traditional "modules" as syntax and semantics are really as useful in our studies as conventional wisdom would have us believe. ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "Only a schoolteacher innocent of how literature is made could have written such a line."--Gore Vidal