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Article 3170 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan27.023623.8118@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 27 Jan 92 07:36:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Jan27.023623.8118
References: <1992Jan23.221339.24355@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan23.215145.7979@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Jan24.172328.7312@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <1992Jan24.172328.7312@aisb.ed.ac.uk> 
jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>In article <1992Jan23.215145.7979@husc3.harvard.edu> 
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>>In article <1992Jan23.221339.24355@aisb.ed.ac.uk> 
>>jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

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

DMD:
>>>>Now suppose you find a typewriter behaving this way.  Four hypotheses
>>>>occur to you (in increasing order of probability):
>>>>
>>>>   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.

JD:
>>>If we're inclined towards (3), all we should say is that AI has
>>>suceeded in producing the behavior.  After all, there might be
>>>different kinds of computer programs, some of which understand
>>>and some of which don't, even if we don't go so far as table
>>>lookup.

MZ:
>>Why isn't every computer program state-transition isomorphic to some table
>>lookup device, perhaps augmented with an update routine?

JD:
>By "table lookup" I had in mind the particular table lookup machine
>that's been sugested as a thought experiment.

I understood that.

JD:
>My point here was that if you conclude (3) what you've concluded
>is that it's a program.  My suggestion is that there might be
>different kinds of programs that can produce the observed behavior.

My suggestion is that the distinction in kind is immaterial to the question
of machine consciousness.

JD:
>By "different kind" I don't mean that one's equivalent to some table
>lookup and the other isn't, but rather that they might work in
>different ways.  As a simple example, imagine programs that print
>the permutations of the list (A B C).  One kind of program might
>just have a list of all the permutations built into it, which it
>could just print.  Another kind might have a procedure for
>generating the permutations of a list and apply that to the list
>(A B C).

This isn't what I had in mind.  Compare two programs generating the same
kind of output for the same kinds of input (e.g. two sort algorithms).  Why
would the intensional difference in program stricture be relevant to our
issue?

>-- jd


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