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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
Message-ID: <D0EJ0z.My6@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
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 18:22:11 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.skeptic:97300 comp.ai.philosophy:23262 sci.philosophy.meta:15348

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:
......
>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.
>
I sure will.

>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.
>
Part of the controversy seems to me to be what you mean by "disagree with 
the TT". You seem to imagine TT as a sort of "test ofr consciousnes 
(understanding)" in a similar spirit as a test for say superconductivity or
perhaps Down's syndrom (or alike). I think that very few people would think
so. You are fighting shadows.

>>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!)
>
Often you seem to ascribe to me very extreme positions, maybe because I often
state my opinions in a relatively catagorical terms.

>>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.
>
Please send it to me when you find it.

>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).
>
I do not understand. Do you mean that in the statement "Bill understands 
Godel's theorem" Bill treats mathematical symbols as meaningless?? Andwhat does it in fact mean that "words mean anything to Y"? If Searle (or you perhaps)
treat "meaning" as some mysterious property which Y is able to sense, that
we are in deep disagreament. There was a short while ago a discussion about
"humans as meaning sensitive systems" espousing this (I'd say dualistic)
notion. 

>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.
>
Of course it is possible to pass a (sort ot TT) test without understanding. 
Many students do it routinely :-) (happened to me too when I was a student, 
although it took me some time to see it). Whoever denied it? This is why no one 
sensible :-) will treat TT on the same level as usual scientific tests (say for 
pregnancy or a presence of a virus etc), which you seem to imply that people do.
However, consciousness is not a phenomenon on the same level as ones which 
the usual scientific tests are trying to establish.
BTW, do you then agree that understanding can be graded?
........
>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.)
>
I do not remeber this, but you are probably right - it wouldn't me math in our
sense. But then it casts shadow on an idea of universality of math concepts,
which I've thought you were in favor of.

>-- jeff

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
