From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utcsri!rutgers!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl Tue Jun 23 13:21:24 EDT 1992
Article 6331 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!torn!utcsri!rutgers!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl
>From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Turing Test is not a Trick
Message-ID: <1992Jun19.155239.8157@oracorp.com>
Date: 19 Jun 92 15:52:39 GMT
Organization: ORA Corporation
Lines: 45

markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes (In response to Stanley Friesen):
 
>> Why should E.T. physiology be capable of anything resembling human
>> intonation?
>
> Looking at it another way, how can you look at human verbal communication,
> which is a complex of words, rules both strict and flexible, intonation
> of many kinds (stress, speed, voice quality, pitch, accent), gesture,
> facial expression, and inference, and abstract out only the purely verbal
> exchanges as worthy of study and indicative of intelligence?

I don't think anyone picks out verbal behavior as being the only way
that intelligence can manifest itself. The point of the Turing Test is
that sophisticated enough verbal behavior is a *sufficient* indication
of intelligence.

There is something special about language as compared with other
intelligent behaviors, and that is its universality. You can talk
about anything, and so an in-depth conversation can reveal the
participants' understanding of much more than simply the present
circumstances.

I believe that if you are limited to interacting with a being only
through teletype (as we are on the Net, by the way), you can, with
time, get a good idea about the intelligence, the creativity, the
thoughtfulness, the interests, etc. of a person. No other single
aspect of behavior can reveal as much information. Personally, if a
being were *only* capable of verbal behavior, I would consider the
being to be intelligent if that behavior was sufficiently
sophisticated.

> Just to give one example, watching an alien successfully repair its
> broken space scooter would give you good prima facie evidence for its
> intelligence, even if it never uttered a word (besides a photic
> obscenity or two).

I'm not sure. Animals are capable of very complex behavior (beavers
building dams, bees finding their way to fields of flowers) without
what we would consider intelligence. I think that the kind of
intelligence that humans seem capable of but animals are not is very
bound up with our language abilities.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY


