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From: olaf@cwi.nl (Olaf Weber)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
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Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 20:45:45 GMT
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In article <3b5f56$d2o@news-rocq.inria.fr>, ziane@monica.inria.fr (Mikal Ziane (Univ. Paris 5 and INRIA) ) writes:

[ It is hard to test arithmetic competence. ]

> Is not it the same for intelligence ?  For humans we have some (very
> vague) idea of the way the brain works, and more importantly maybe
> of what a human being is, so that a behavioral test is (more or
> less) enough. The question of deciding if a human being is
> intelligent is of course not easy, but OK at least we think that
> most people are more intellignent than vi or emacs or even Chess
> Genius.  We say that a human is intelligent based on a finite set of
> tests, because we assume something on the way she/he passes the
> tests and thus this tells us something of whether or not she/he
> could pass other tests.

> Thus a purely behavioral defintion like passing TT seems imperfect.

Yes, but can we do better?  What other arguments can we use?

Searle seems to think that the material from which the brain is
constructed is important, but get (IMHO) rather vague when he has to
demonstrate exactly _how_ that could matter.  To me, the restriction
seems rather parochial: he refers to the "neuronal chauvinism" that
only entities with neurons like our own can have mental states(*), but
cheerfully makes the same mistake (IMHO) elsewhere in his arguments.

(*) The Rediscovery of the Mind, Chapter 2 section III, page 38 in the
MIT paperback edition.

I'm quite willing to grant intelligence to other people on the
strength of my own, combined with their similarity to me. :-)

But that still leaves the question how we could know that an alien is
intelligent, if its behaviour doesn't give us the clues we need.

-- Olaf Weber
