Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!lee
From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Do dogs love their humans (was: Can machines think....)
Message-ID: <6791@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 90 17:47:59 GMT
References: <4030@cbnewsj.ATT.COM>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 24

From article <4030@cbnewsj.ATT.COM>, by jwi@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ):
>...
>Lyle Seaman writes:
>| All of this is just language usage. ...
>...
>Language is exactly the point. ...

Now we're cooking with gas.  The Searle-ite intuition is founded on the
reasoning that `think' is said of humans, computers are not humans, and
therefore computers can't think.  Or rather, more precisely, computers
can't `think'.  Apart from the question of word usage, the line of
reasoning is completely trivial and devoid of any substantive interest.

I stated the fact about word usage too baldly.  It is not exactly true
that `think' is said only of humans, but rather of things that are human
or things to which one wishes to attribute some human-like quality.  So
a more cumbersome but more accurate way of stating the matter is:  if
you wish to attribute a human-like quality to a computer, you will speak
of it as `thinking'; but if you are unwilling to make such an
attribution, you won't.  Opponents of strong AI believe that computers
are unlike humans, and, in effect, state the consequence of this belief
for word usage as evidence for holding this belief.

			Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu