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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: Bag the Turing test (was: Penrose and Searle)
Message-ID: <jqbD0DG73.4uu@netcom.com>
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References: <CzFr3J.990@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <1994Nov24.135351.25743@unix.brighton.ac.uk> <D00167.91w@spss.com> <3bu0gs$fff@sun4.bham.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 04:23:26 GMT
Lines: 47

In article <3bu0gs$fff@sun4.bham.ac.uk>,
Aaron Sloman <axs@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
>Amongst my saved gems from usenet, I have the following, posted by
>Cliff Joslyn cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu in comp.ai
>Date: 1 Feb 90 02:38:23 GMT
>saying:
>| On p.  vi.  of the introduction to the classic anthology /Automata
>| Studies/ (Annals of Math.  Studies # 34, Princeton U., 1956, including
>| Kleene, von Neumann, Minsky, Moore, Shannon, Ashby, MacKay), Shannon and
>| McCarthy say:
>|
>| "A disadvantage of the Turing definition of thinking is that it is
>| possible, in principle, to design a machine with a complete set of
>| arbitrarily chosen responses to all possible input stimuli.  Such a
>| machine, in a sense, for any given input situation (including past
>| history) merely looks up in a 'dictionary' the appropriate response.
>| With a suitable dictionary, such a machine would surely satisfy Turing's
>| definition, but does not reflect our usual intuitive concept of
>| thinking.  This suggests that a more fundamental definition must involve
>| something relating to the manner in which the machine arrives at its
>| responses -- something which corresponds to differentiating between a
>| person who solves a problem by thinking it out and one who has
>| previously memorized the answer".
>
>(I've not read the original, or checked the accuracy of the
>transcription.)
>
>This point is frequently reinvented in one form or another. (My
>summary is that intelligence is not concerned with WHAT one can do
>but with HOW one does it.)

This seems to me to involve an ambiguity about the word "thinking".  Some
people, when faced with a quadratic equation, can with no or almost no
conscious (!, ?) thought produce the answer.  On the other hand I, on
occasion, have had to derive the quadratic formula because I couldn't remember
it, and then "think out" the result of plugging in the values.  Does this make
me more of a thinker than they?  "Thinking" and "thinking out" (or "conscious
thought") do not seem to describe the same thing.  Any definition of thinking
that tries to separate it from memory seems in error to me.  And you have moved
from thinking to intelligence in your summary.  I can imagine accepting a
definition of thinking as involving *how* far readily than I can a definition
of intelligence.  Perhaps in the future we will have many different projects
that have produced many different machines that use many different mechanisms
to achieve similar ends.  If so, it is possible that the attempt to define
thinking or intelligence in terms of *how* will be abandoned as futile.
-- 
<J Q B>
