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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Folk psychology (was: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?)
Message-ID: <Cwut0z.Jst@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <1994Sep27.141324.5893@oracorp.com>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 19:05:23 GMT
Lines: 71

In article <1994Sep27.141324.5893@oracorp.com>,
Daryl McCullough <daryl@oracorp.com> wrote:
......
>
>Take almost any example of a simple interaction involving two humans.
>If you tell somebody that "You left your car lights on." or "You left
>your car window down, and it's starting to rain." and you can predict
>with good accuracy how that person will react. Why is that? I think it
>is because you assume that the person has certain desires (not to run
>down his battery, not to get the inside of his car wet), and that he
>will act on them based on the information he has available. If
>somebody asks you "Why did that person go back to his car?" you will
>be able to tell them "To turn off his lights" or "To roll up his
>windows". These are trivial predictions, but if you consider how very
>complex human behavior is, it is a tremendous success to be able to
>make such predictions. The idea that some advanced theory of the brain
>will supplant folk psychology in reasoning about such things seems
>completely ridiculous to me. Not because I doubt that there will be
>such advances, but because the folk psychology explanation is the
>*correct* explanation already. If you had answered the question "Why
>did that person go back to his car?" with an answer such as "Because
>synapses fired, causing an electrochemical pulse to travel to his leg
>muscles" people would have considered you insane. Not that the answer
>is wrong, only that it is inappropriate, at the wrong level.
>
You are pointing here to an important feature of folk psychology, namely
that it is based on everyday language desription of input and output (to 
and from the brain). Desires, beliefs etc. are possibly descriptions of 
the brain states in the same language, basically as states which predispose 
to such and such actions (output) under such and such conditions (input).
If so, then I do not see a reason why such states could not be more precisely
defined and investigated and input and output correlated better when we
have better knowledge of physico-chemical structure of the brain. Yes, we
might also need a somewhat more precise description of input and output.
Note that for instance our language is not always able to describe elements
of the input which influence our behavior (as in "I really do not know why
I hit him,  there was something in his tone of voice which I did not like").
You are right in your claim that for everyday human relations the folk 
psychology may be all that may ever make sense, but this may be because
in everyday situations our control over input and output is not very precise,
but things may be different in other settings.
 
>To me, folk psychology defines the subject matter of cognitive science
>and Artificial Intelligence. A system will never be considered
>intelligent or conscious unless some kind of folk psychology applies
>to it. Computers surpass humans in chess-playing ability, and maybe
>someday they will surpass us in mathematics and all other kinds of
>reasoning. But they will not be considered to have minds unless they
>have something that we can recognize as goals, beliefs, desires, plans
>for the future, memory of the past. In other words, they must be
>understandable in terms of folk psychology.
>
I am not sure you are quite right here. It seems to me that an artificial
"brain" which could for instance be able to solve difficult mental puzzles,
mathematical problems, knew laws of physics and could use them to reason
about natural phenomena would be considered intelligent. It migh be considered
to be without feelings, without sense of humor, without empathy, but still
intelligent. Whether it would be accepted as an equal, from the point of view
of rights, is another story. Probably it would not if it could not convince 
humans that it can suffer, but this is more a cultural phenomenon.

>Daryl McCullough
>ORA Corp.
>Ithaca, NY

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
