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Article 2329 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: kohout@cs.umd.edu (Robert Kohout)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle's response to silicon brain?
Message-ID: <45304@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 20 Dec 91 23:05:41 GMT
References: <1991Dec18.173854.3551@spss.com>
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Mark Rosenfelder writes:
>brain-- he simply denies that such a contraption would be a mind.
>
>As for "hatred of science," this is meaningless rhetoric.  AI researchers
>are attempting to model what minds do, which is a nice scientific project.
>(The distinction between modelling and creating minds has no practical
>effect at this time.)
>What is the experimental program of the anti-AI theorists?  What are their
>specific predictions, confirmable by experiment, which will support their
>theories and confound their adversaries?

A minor nit. Cognitive psychologists are mind modelers, AI researchers 
desire to engineer intelligent systems. Most of the time, one cares
very little whether or not a particular system mimics the human mind
(the exceptions usually occur when there's potential to publish in
a Cog.Sci. journal ;-)) The emphasis, insofar as AI is engineering,
is on behavior. Admittedly, the two fields so often overlap it is
easy to conflate the two. Most AI practioners are self-styled
cognitive theorists, which compounds the problem. Nonetheless, I
must object to your parenthetical. There is a very big difference
between modeling a mind and get a computer to do some of the things
that people do with little or no effort.

Bob Kohout


