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Article 3243 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan28.233247.9657@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 28 Jan 92 23:32:47 GMT
References: <1992Jan23.215145.7979@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Jan24.172328.7312@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan27.023623.8118@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In article <1992Jan27.023623.8118@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>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:
>
>JD:
>>                             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?

It's easy to change my example so that there's I/O or arguments and
results (which, from your sort example, I take it is sufficient).

Imagine a Lisp function (say) that computes permutations vs one
that looks them up in tables.

I agree that for some purposes the difference doesn't matter.
Indeed, using tables is sometimes better; hence the idea of
"memoizing" functions so that they needn't recompute the value
for an argument they've already seen.

An example closer to AI might be Chess.  Some Chess programs
use almost nothing but brute force search and others don't.
There were even programs that played better Chess after some
of the sophisticated analysis was removed, because they could
do more search.

Now, if no programs can be conscious, then it doesn't matter how
they work.

On the other hand, if we suppose that some programs might produce
consciousness, it seems to me that it could matter how they work.
The table lookup machine might be an example of a program that
passes the Turing Test but wouldn't be conscious.  My view is
that consciousness involves some processes or ways of representing
the system to itself that wouldn't occur in table lookup of the
sort in question.  I could be wrong about this.  But not because
all programs are equivalent to some machine that looks things up
in tables.


