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Article 3460 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: smoliar@maclane.iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Subject: Re: Searle Agrees with Strong AI?
Message-ID: <1992Feb4.010409.9415@nuscc.nus.sg>
Summary: the "clubs" of life and intelligence
Sender: usenet@nuscc.nus.sg
Reply-To: smoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar)
Organization: Institute of Systems Science, NUS, Singapore
References: <TODD.92Jan23224728@ai12.elcom.nitech.ac.jp> <1992Jan27.023737.1343@nuscc.nus.sg> <TODD.92Jan29143005@ai07.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1992 01:04:09 GMT

In article <TODD.92Jan29143005@ai07.elcom.nitech.ac.jp>
todd@juno.elcom.nitech.ac.jp writes:
>
>In article <1992Jan27.023737.1343@nuscc.nus.sg> smoliar@maclane.iss.nus.sg
>(stephen smoliar) writes:
>
>>>  Perhaps we should first try to define what
>>>constitutes an ecosystem:  What is it about both the whole, its parts, and
>>>the way those parts interact that leads us to classify it as such.  After
>>>than, we should be in a position to classify the living parts of the
>>>ecosystem.
>>>This then gives us the definition of life over which we have been
>>>struggling:
>>>A living entity is a living part of an ecosystem!
>
>This opens a large can of worms which is perhaps unnecesary.  It is
>more a description of how life happens to occur in our environment.

I find it very difficult to believe that a description which pulls back to the
abstractions of "the whole, its parts, and the way those parts interact" can be
construed as biased towards our own environment.  You are, of course, free to
INTERPRET those abstractions in terms of our environment;  but nothing is
stopping you from pursuing other interpretations.  (This is the sort of thing
currently taking place among those artificial life researchers who are
particularly interested in what would constitute life without the usual
chemical foundations of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.)

>  There
>could very well be a planet with exactly one intelligent, alive being
>(albeit lonely!) on a totally barren landscape (suppose it eats black dirt,
>produces brown dirt excrement, and produces one offspring after which
>it quickly dies).  Would you still call such a system an ecosystem?
>
If you begin your discussion by inserting the words "intelligent" and "alive"
into your premise, you do not leave very much room for discussion!  I do not
have an immediate answer to your question.  Were I to try and take it on (which
I am a bit reluctant to do since, as I have observed, I fear you have loaded
the dice against me), I would use my own methodology.  Have you given me a
complete description of "the whole, its parts, and the way those parts
interact;"  or has some of that information gotten buried under all that
black and brown dirt?

>>>This leads me to ask if we might take an analogous approach to intelligence.
>>>There seems to be a general consensus by now that coming up with definitions
>>>for intelligence from scratch do not get very far.  Perhaps we would be in a
>>>better position to try to characterize a SOCIAL system (analogous to an
>>>ecosystem) and approach intelligence in terms of how well individuals manage
>>>in that social system.  Needless to say, such an approach should be as free
>>>as possible of our own cultural biases;  so perhaps it is time for the
>>>anthropologists to move in again (as they did in Suchman's work on
>>>planning).
>
>Again, unnecessary.  The same line of reasoning that says "birds cause
>flying", and airplanes don't fly.  Gotta keep the airplanes out of the
>flight club and the Chinese room out of the intelligence club!!
>
I do not think clubs have anything to do with this argument.  There is nothing
wrong with recognizing that words like "life" and "intelligence" give us a hard
time.  All I am really suggesting is that we may benefit from seeking out a new
set of ontological joints along which to carve.  Those new joints are probably
not going to give us any better answers, but they provide us with more useful
conventions for using those words in the first place.

>Maybe we should define life as something which discriminates.

If that is the case, then you had better be prepared to take on the qualia
crowd.  Would you say that a thermostat discriminates hot from cold?  If it
does, would you then say it is alive;  or would you say that it does NOT
discriminate because you KNOW it is not alive (just as Searle knows that
he does not know Chinese)?  It sounds like all your doing as adding
"discriminate" to the list of words that give us a hard time.
-- 
Stephen W. Smoliar; Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore; Heng Mui Keng Terrace
Kent Ridge, SINGAPORE 0511
Internet:  smoliar@iss.nus.sg


