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Article 3026 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan22.221225.2877@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 22 Jan 92 22:12:25 GMT
References: <1992Jan22.161342.17781@cs.yale.edu> <1992Jan22.200714.20798@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan22.204734.20123@cs.yale.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 23

In article <1992Jan22.204734.20123@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott) writes:

>   1. It's a miraculous-coincidence system
>   2. It's a humongous-table system
>   3. AI has succeeded
>   4. There's a person on the other end
>
>Surely 1 and 2 are not serious contenders.  Hence although they are
>technically counterexamples to Behavioral Strong AI ("if it behaves as
>if it understands, then it does"), they are not really hypotheses that
>anyone would entertain.

I agree with this, which is why I think the Turing test is probably fine
in practice (except that it's unreasonably hard -- why should an
intelligent machine have to imitate a human?).  The look-up table is just
a thought-experiment to demonstrate that behaviour can't be an absolute
criterion for mentality.  As an indicator of mentality under practical
conditions, behaviour is fine.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


