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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
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jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:


>flawed, I nonetheless find that they help suggest that the TT is
>flawed as well.  If you want to show that "the system understands",
>you need more than "it passes the TT, therefore it understands".


The problem is that without some operational definition of intelligence,
it can't be discussed quantitatively at all.  The reason for the test
is, as far as I see, simple.  We are the most intelligent beings on 
earth. Even if we don't really know what it is, we can recognize it
when we see it. What better instrument with which to measure it than
those who have it in some statistical sense. If the machine can 
fool many/most people or at least as many people as other people
then in some sense the machine is good enough to pass for having
intelligence. It's an excellent start. One might call it "the"
definition of intelligence. It's not much different than defining
some intervals on a glass tube of mercury as temperature on th
Fahrenheit scale. So later it was found that it's better to have 
an absolute temperature scale, but would probably never have happened
if that first instrument [as crude as it was]  did not exist. Thermodynamics
probably would/could not have developed.

So far it's the TT vs IQ tests. It would be easier [probably]
for machines to pass IQ tests than the TT test.



--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
