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Article 4495 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: degroff@tricorder.IntelliCorp.COM (Les Degroff)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: The nerd case (Understanding vs "common sense")
Message-ID: <1992Mar17.011729.12500@icmv>
Date: 17 Mar 92 01:17:29 GMT
Lines: 29
Nntp-Posting-Host: tricorder


   We might throw into this consideration of the Chinese
room, two more "common sensical" kinds of examples.
There is are common sterotypes of social misfits who 
while they almost certainly  would pass a "Turing test" but
could fail many common social "understanding" tests, IE the
Nerd and/or social misfit who can converse but is ignorant 
(lacks understanding) of all kinds of things like grooming,
social interactions ect.   As layed out, the Chinese room
might with sufficient rules be able to pass some Turing tests
but not have sense to exist and operate in a physical world.
   Linguistic symbol manipulation can be seperated at some places 
from "world object" symbol manipulations/operations and both
may in part be seperated from "effector" operations.  
   It seems that the Turing test by it's nature must be forever
a series of facets and fragments, it focuses on communications and
human evaluation/rating of intelligence not on some absolute 1 or 0
state.  Because I can't speak Chinese or symbolic dialect foo can
not imply that I am not intelligent.  
  In the sense of pramatics (rather than at impossible limits) there
are a large set of "tricks of the" Turing  that let us tease out 
(with out ever being certain) our belief in Human, Machine or other
intelligence.  Questions in symbolic form can probe limits of 
the black box's context, capability for prediction, analysis.
  As I have stated before, a major factor in our view of intelligence
that we have not yet had a good chance to explore yet is "long histories".
A human newborn, could not pass the Turing test, could not work the
Chinese room   ??? Is it intelligent??  Is it cabable of becoming an
intelligent entitiy?? 


