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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
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Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 21:21:02 GMT
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In article <D03L02.J5B@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>In article <D01FA6.DuK@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
>Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>In article <Czzrvs.A1u@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>>>In article <3b5d05$d2o@news-rocq.inria.fr>,
>>>Mikal Ziane (Univ. Paris 5 and INRIA)  <ziane@monica.inria.fr> wrote:
>>>......
>>>>
>>>>My point was precisely that I do not think TT is a very good definition
>>>>of intelligence and I think that this is what CR suggests albeit clumsily.
>>>
>>>It probably is not, but Turing thought that it was the best we could do and 
>>>not much chaged since then. Or perhaps you have a better definition?
>>>I can't see how CR suggests anything of the sorts. In fact, being methodolo-
>>>gically wrong, it does not suggest anything.
>>
>>Andrzej -- can I tell Ozan Yigit that you defend the TT?  From this,
>>but more from other articles, it seems to me that you do.
>>
>Depending what you mean by "defending". In a sense - yes. However, it seems
>to me that you are trying to box me into a silly position which I do not
>hold. 

I am happy to be corrected.  If I seem to be saying you hold that P
when you actually hold otherwise, for any P, please let me know.

As for my dispute with Oz, I hope I turn out to be wrong.
If, in fact, many disagree with the TT I'd regard that as
an excellent result.

>Mark Rosenfelder presented a position which basically is the same as 
>mine.

Really?  I agree with most of what he said, but I often feel I
disaagree with you.  (Not always, of course!)

>>I used to think the TT was right, BTW.  I even wrote a paper defending
>>it when I was a student.  Although I think Searle's arguments are
>>flawed, I nonetheless find that they help suggest that the TT is
>>flawed as well.  If you want to show that "the system understands",
>>you need more than "it passes the TT, therefore it understands".
>>
>When you say "Person X understands Y" you in fact define "understand" as
>passing a sort of a TT by X concerning problem Y, don't you? Or do you "need
>more"? A professor passes his students on basis of a sort of TT too, right?

There was (to my mind) a good c.ai.phil article about this a few years
back that I may be able to find.

I think "understand" is an unfortunate choice.  I don't think the
sense of "understand" at issue w/ Searle is the quite same as that in,
say, "Bill understands Godel's theorem".  The Searlean sense is
more along the lines of whether words mean anything to Y (or does
Y treat them as meaningless symbols).

In any case, it does seem to be possible to pass tests without
understanding the subject or at least w/o understanding it as well
as the test results suggest.

>>It may be that we will eventually establish that the TT is a
>>reliable test.  But that's not the only possible outcome.
>>
>Considering the vague notion of "understanding" we have now, basically based
>on passing sort of a TT, TT is good as it is. If we at some point require
>something "more", it will mean that have additional criteria what it means 
>to "understand" and hence that our notion will be different, as rightly
>pointed out by Neil Rickert.

Well, if _that_'s the way you want to run it, I might even agree.
At least I've often agreed with (and even made) that kind of argument
(e.g. a discussion in c.a.phil a fair while back about whether future
or alien maths could be radically different from ours.  I argued that
if it were sufficiently different, we wouldn't think it was maths at
all.)

-- jeff
