Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!convex!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!argos.montclair.edu!hubey
From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: I lie therefore I am?
Message-ID: <hubey.780787744@pegasus.montclair.edu>
Sender: root@argos.montclair.edu (Operator)
Organization: SCInet @ Montclair State
References: <779979345snz@develco.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 21:29:04 GMT
Lines: 27

Nigel@develco.demon.co.uk (Nigel Phillips) writes:

>It would seem that all human beings can lie and most do.
>It seems inevitable therefore that If a machine has human intelligence it is 
>capable of lying and probably will lie. If I designed a "thinking machine" and 
>didn't design it to lie but subsequently found that it did then I would be 
>inclined to consider it was displaying human like intelligence. What do people 
>think? - be as honest as you like.

Of course!  If a machine couldn't lie it would never pass the Turing test.
It would be easy to catch such a machine. Aside from the fact that this
machine, in principle, could be given so much knowledge--which it would
NEVER forget--that we could always know that it's a machine because no human
could have so much knowledge and never make slips, we'd know that the machine
was a machine and not human by its inability to lie--like the natives in those
famous Smullyan stories.

Even such lowly life forms as birds are capable of lying --some might say
instinct as usual to avoid having to impute intelligence to anything other
than humans -- since they are capable of putting on ~broken wing" tricks
to lead predators away from their young.  And they can even count--up to
3 or 4 or so.

--
						-- 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
