From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!uchinews!spssig!markrose Tue Jan 28 12:16:55 EST 1992
Article 3087 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan23.231248.40983@spss.com>
Date: 23 Jan 92 23:12:48 GMT
References: <1992Jan23.160551.21216@oracorp.com>
Organization: SPSS, Inc.
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In article <1992Jan23.160551.21216@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:
>I thought that the updating mechanism was quite clear. The Chinese
>Room is supposed to simulate a person confined to a small room, with
>no way of communicating with the outside word except through a textual
>interface. 

I understood the teletype requirement as simply a mechanism to give the
machine a fighting chance.  It keeps us from deciding that the machine
isn't intelligent because it doesn't _look_ like a human being.  On the
other hand, it exempts the machine from visual processing, speech recognition,
interpretation and generation of body language, tone, and other things which
are arguably part of human intelligence.

The business of confining the human or machine to be tested to a small 
room seems to stack the deck even further in favor of the machine.
If you were trying to prove your intelligence to an alien being, wouldn't
it be harder if you were confined to the interrogation chamber?  Wouldn't
you rather take the being on a tour of your everyday life, so it could
see how you interact with other humans, how you work, how you respond
to changes in the environment, etc.?

>You are right that the question of "what time is it" would stump the
>Chinese Room, since no sense of time was built in. However, that is
>addressable by either 1. Having the CR say "I don't have a watch, and
>my sense of time in here is unreliable", or 2. Having each input
>message be accompanied with a time-stamp telling the current time.

The program with the time stamp is not the simple lookup table any more.

But besides this, there are other questions we can ask to stump the
table-lookup machine.  "What city are we in?"  "What year is it?"

The table can contain as sensible a set of replies to these questions as
we can find, but an accumulation of such evasive answers is going to
be very suspicious.

Conversing with the table-lookup machine would be kind of like talking
with a person suffering from advanced Korsakov's syndrome-- someone who
has no ability to remember events past a certain point in his life.
I wouldn't equate being able to simulate a mental patient with "passing
the Turing test."  Is PARRY intelligent?


