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Article 3077 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.logic,sci.math,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Penrose on Man vs. Machine
Message-ID: <1992Jan23.215806.29757@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 92 21:58:06 GMT
References: <1992Jan20.124249.7832@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Jan22.203136.24023@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan22.233028.7894@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Followup-To: comp.ai.philosophy
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 33

[Followups directed to comp.ai.philosophy.]

In article <1992Jan22.233028.7894@aisb.ed.ac.uk> philkime@aifh.ed.ac.uk () writes:
>In article <1992Jan22.203136.24023@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>
>[Strong AI....]
>>The claim that an appropriately programmed computer could think (feel,
>>understand,...).  More precisely, the claim that there exists a program
>>P such that implementing P is sufficient for mentality.
>
>This may have been the case 30 or 40 years ago but this is only accurate
>if you focus on Symbolic Functionalism.

As I've said before, "strong AI" is a technical term, due to Searle, and
is not a term representing every view that an AI practitioner might hold.
But the above is simplistic in any case.  One certainly does not have
to be a "Symbolic Functionalist" to accept strong AI.  I'm personally
much more sympathetic to connectionism, for instance, but I still
accept the claim in question.

>And even then, any Symbolic
>Functionalist worth his philosophical salt would be extremely wary what
>was meant by 'program' here given the (possibly insurmountable) problems
>in 'implementing', in a SF way, the necessary and sufficient conditions
>for mentality discussed by Dreyfus.

If one accepted the original Dreyfus arguments, presumably one wouldn't
be a symbolic functionalist in the first place.

-- 
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."


