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Article 2786 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
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Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Message-ID: <UdRR3vW00iUx82DLkV@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1992 13:37:47 -0500 
>From: Franklin Boyle <fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Searle, again

Daryl McCullough writes:

>Frank Boyle writes:

>>>Frank, I don't know what on Earth you are talking about. What computer
>>>simulation of digestion allows you to put real bananas and hamburgers
>>>in and get out energy and waste products?
 
>>You didn't say anything about eating and eliminating waste. You said
>>digestion. And your output was energy.
 
>This conversation is almost too silly to continue, but anyway:
>digestion is a process that takes in food and outputs waste products
>plus chemical energy in the form of ATP (plus other things). To pass
>the "Digestion Turing Test", a computer would have to accept the same
>inputs and produce the same outputs. Energy is *not* (primarily) an
>output of digestion, the chemical ATP is. If you built a machine that
>actually did take in food and output ATP plus waste products, then I
>have no problem considering it to be a kind of digestion.
> 
> 
>In the case of the real Turing Test, the inputs and outputs are
>exactly the same as with a conversation involving a real human being:
>both the inputs and the outputs are words.

It's silly if we sit around arguing over what is and is not part
of digestion.  But there are other issues involved.  For example, your
original post did only say energy. It may be silly to worry about this,
but it should be pointed out that such a limitation is similar to the
"pen pal" (Harnad's characterization) limitations of the Turing Test.
The Robotic Turing test is more analogous to what you're now stating
explicitly as output criteria for the Digestion Turing test. In 
essence, you've placed correspondingly stronger demands on the latter
as the Robotic TT does on thinking compared to the TT.  That's fine,
but when you use digestion to situate a statement about the form of
the input and output for the TT, the critical features should be noted.

Also, the way the Turing test is set up (or the Robotic Turing test),
there are certain limitations on what you, the judge, are allowed to
observe. In the former, it's simply the output at a teletype and in 
the Robotic test, you can't look inside the Robot.  Similarly, if
you're going to make comparisons between Digestive Turing tests and
the Turing Test, then you have to demand similar constraints for the
observer of a digestive test.  Certainly waste and consumption and
energy are fine, but I think it's not appropriate to go in and test
for ATP (analogous to going into a program in a Turing test to see
what algorithm it uses to answer questions about chess, for example).
If you use waste and comsumption, then you have to add other devices
just like for a Robotic Test you would have to add devices over and 
above a teletype.

Demanding ATP production is like requiring that your thinking machine
do its processing on neural hardware.

I guess my point is that you can't expect to make sound inferences if
the comparisons or analogies you're basing them on are questionable.

-Frank





