From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Thu Jan 16 17:20:12 EST 1992
Article 2692 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
Message-ID: <366@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jan 92 22:32:05 GMT
References: <1991Dec5.210724.12480@cs.yale.edu> <1991Dec8.192843.6951@psych.toronto.edu> <1991Dec11.170157.27053@cs.yale.edu> <1991Dec11.203452.9419@psych.toronto.edu> <317@tdatirv.UUCP> <5913@skye.ed.ac.uk> <364@tdatirv.UUCP> <5942@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 49

In article <5942@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
|In article <364@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:
|>In article <5913@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
|>|Is that really suppose to be all there is to a person, a set of
|>|behaviors, memories, and attitudes?
|>
|>That is really all that can be *verified* to exist from the outside.
|
|Memories are verified from outside?

Yes.  In school we called this process 'taking exams' or 'taking tests'. :-)

More generally, memories alters behavior in ways that can be identified.
This constitutes verification in the scientific sense.

|>[Unless one wishes to count the body as well].
|
|Which we should.  How else than by looking at the body can we
|make any progress in finding out how memories, behaviors, and
|so forth work?

I am not talking about whether bodies are somthing that needs to be studied
to understand people, I am talking about whether the body is part of what
makes a 'person' an individual.  If my memories, attitudes and behavior
patterns could be transfered to another body, would I still be me?

If so, then the body is not part of what it means to be a person.

|>Thus that is all that has any scientific relevance.  Anything else
|>is, at present, merely unfounded speculation or philosophical bias.
|
|I see.  So if it can't be verified, it must be unfounded
|speculation or bias?

Hmm, I was having a hard time finding a good terminology here.  I am trying
to express the idea that it is not *scientific*.  What is the opposite
of 'scientific'?

|>It may exist, but there is no way of telling.
|
|And so, what, exactly?

So, if it is not verifiable even in theory, it has no place in a scientific
discipline, like AI research.  Science must restrict itself to the verifiable,
since that is what it is competent at dealing with.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)



