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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
Message-ID: <jqbD0DDvB.MHy@netcom.com>
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References: <Czzrvs.A1u@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <D01FA6.DuK@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <D03L02.J5B@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <D0Cwn2.1t9@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
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Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 03:33:11 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.skeptic:97252 comp.ai.philosophy:23220 sci.philosophy.meta:15330

In article <D0Cwn2.1t9@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>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.

How can one say when P is poorly formed?

>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.

It would help if you defined your shorthand "the TT" (I take it to be
shorthand, since noun phrases don't make good propositions).  You might mean
anything from "the TT is a useful tool" to "ability to pass the TT is the one
and only possible definition of consciousness".

>>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!)

Could be a reading comprehension problem.

>>>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).

Well, one of Searle's (and his cohorts in intellectual crime) tricks is
to use a word with multiple, broad, or vague meanings and switch between them
as serves the argument.

It seem to me that you have simply moved the vagueness from "understanding"
to "meaning".  Do Chinese words mean anything to the CR?  They certainly
seem to.  By some possible accounts of meaning, it is meaningless to speak
of symbols that are used in a process to be "meaningless".

How do we determine whether various sounds mean anything to a fellow
human being?  How would you determine whether the Chinese words mean anything
to me?  Would you look at my program?  Examine my interior dialog?

>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.

Amazing how induction can fail, isn't it?  The question is, how do we make
the determinations we do, not how accurate they are.  Andrzej is wrong to
say that we *define* "understanding" as "passing a test"; we define it as
"grasping the subject", or some such; but our (necessarily fallible) *test*
to *determine* whether the subject has been grasped is a TT of sorts.  In the
same way, the TT is not a *definition* of intelligence, but it is a test of
whether intelligence, however that attribute is defined, applies to a particular
subject.

>>>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.

Er, um, isn't this what everyone has been saying all along?

>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.)

I don't think Andrzej was talking about radical differences of this
sort.  He was talking about the sort of difference between "gold is a shiny
malleable yellow substance" and "gold is the element with atomic number 79".
We still think that gold is gold, but we have a different notion of what
it means to be gold, because we have a more refined understanding of the
underlying mechanism that gives rise to the characteristics of gold.
Rather than defining gold by its characteristics, we define it in terms of the
underlying model.  Such may some day become the case for "understanding".

It's interesting how many of these discussions seem to be based upon confusion
about meaning and language.
-- 
<J Q B>
