Newsgroups: sci.lang,sci.psychology,rec.arts.books,comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!miner.usbm.gov!rsg1.er.usgs.gov!stc06.ctd.ornl.gov!fnnews.fnal.gov!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!gatech!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Chomsky on Consciousness and Dennett
Message-ID: <D9GD39.2HI@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <D94Fo0.9CL@cup.hp.com> <3q2put$p07@Mercury.mcs.com> <JMC.95May28094246@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> <3qb1ju$71@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 31 May 1995 17:11:32 GMT
Lines: 70
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang:39639 sci.psychology:42300 comp.ai.philosophy:28485

In article <3qb1ju$71@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>,
William McDonnell <oldbooks@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>In <JMC.95May28094246@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John
>McCarthy) writes:
>[snip] 
>
>>OK, let's go around a bit.  Our whole notion of belief is based on the
>>fact that ascription of beliefs accounts for behavior.
>
>This is not a fact, but an assumption.  My notion of belief stems from
>actually having beliefs, recognizing them in myself, etc.  It comes
                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>from their existence, not from my ascription that they account for
>behavior.
>
Really? And how do you do this? I assume then that you have never found 
yourself considering your beliefs in a critical fashion and thinking for
instance as following:
"Do I really believe in A? Well, if I believe in A then I'd do B. Do I have
the guts to do B? Actually no. Well, then it means that I do not really
believe in A."
How about an old adage "Put your money where your mouth is"?
Now, in the case of others, how do you know _they_ have beliefs? You will
probably say "They look like me, so they must also have them". This however is
not an honest answer in my view, since we are able to ascribe to other people 
very different beliefs than the ones we "recognize in ourselves". And on
which basis do we do this?? Note that sometimes we say about someone "He/she
does not believe in anything"  On basis of what do we make such a statement?
(If you say that this is a just a casual expression, not to be taken seriously,
consider that the person may be severely mentally handicaped) So even if
someone does look like us it does not necessarily mean that he/she has beliefs,
right? 
And if the entity in question does not look like us? Women and men differ in
many respects, how did we decide that the other sex has beliefs too? And how
about those with different skin color, or a very different stature (say 
pygmies)? Did we first do a careful study of their brains before accepting that
they have beliefs? 
How would you go about deciding if apes have beliefs? Or dolphins?

>What troubles me about the 'beliefs exist because we ascribe them'
>argument is the anthropomorphic nature of this view.  That we may wish
>to see CPUs as having--or potentially acquiring--the attributes of
>humans, does not mean that such attributes actually exist, any more
>than if I thought of them as manifestations resulting from the plant
>kingdom influencing programmers into developing means for the material
>world to communicate with other forms of 'stuff.'
>
>Said differently, epistemological dualism once again rears its head. 
>You know what I am getting at.  If one agrees that truth cannot be
>known about the objective world, but only an approximation, then how
>can one ever know about the internal processes of machines?  Sure,
>truth can be approximated in ways suitable to current
>cultural/psychological framing.  Yet, in the necessary attempt at
>approximation I see no reason to add further noise to the signal by
>attributing human characteristics.
>
Instead of looking at the problem as "inflating" the notion of humanhood (by
giving away "human characteristics" to non-humans) why not to recognize that
ascribing beliefs is a way of categorizing behavior and as long as such
categorization is helpful in some way, why shy away from it?

>Bill McDonnell
>oldbooks@ix.netcom.com

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
