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Article 1616 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle (was Re: Daniel Dennett (was Re: Comme
Message-ID: <YAMAUCHI.91Nov26023814@indigo.cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 26 Nov 91 07:38:14 GMT
References: <1991Nov14.223348.4076@milton.u.washington.edu>
	<YAMAUCHI.91Nov25000101@indigo.cs.rochester.edu>
	<1991Nov25.105711.5869@husc3.harvard.edu>
Sender: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi)
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In-Reply-To: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu's message of 25 Nov 91 15:57:09 GMT
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(Note followup line.)

In article <1991Nov25.105711.5869@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>In article <YAMAUCHI.91Nov25000101@indigo.cs.rochester.edu> 
>yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) writes:

>>In article <1991Nov24.195230.5843@husc3.harvard.edu> 
>>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>>>In article <MATT.91Nov24000158@physics.berkeley.edu> 
>>>matt@physics.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) writes:

>MA:
>>>>It isn't terribly clear to me what kind of system could possibly do
>>>>anything other than symbolic manipulation, defined so expansively.
>>>>This argument makes me nervous just because it is so terribly broad:
>>>>if an argument seems to apply to everything, it suggests to me that
>>>>there is a logical flaw in it somewhere.

>MZ:
>>>A symbol is an iconic or a substitutive sign, something that stands for
>>>something else,

>>>Pray tell, what part of the computer hardware or software could
>>>make it stand for something outside the machine, as signs used by humans
>>>stand for things in virtue of their meanings?

>BY:
>>So would you call a "syntactic" symbol one which just refers to
>>something inside the computer hardware/software and a "semantic"
>>symbol one which refers to something outside the computer?

>No, I wouldn't: these terms have standard meanings.  Call them `connected'
>and `disconnected'.

So what do you mean by "stand for something outside the machine"?  And
what do you mean by "stand for things in virtue of their meanings"?

>BY:
>>In that case, consider a robot vision system.  The robot looks down on
>>a table covered with tools.  It's vision system identifies the various
>>tools (hammer, screwdriver, wrench) and stores information about their
>>position and orientation in the robot's memory.

[remainder of example deleted]

>Now we are back to early Russell and his "knowledge by acquaintance"; the
>problem is that you can only know by acquaintance, and so denote by
>logically proper, non-connotative names, your own sense-data; in other
>words, logically proper names can only be said to denote the phenomena to
>which they are internally connected.  This says nothing whatsoever about
>the external objects which cause the visual representations.  Even from the
>discredited phenomenalist standpoint, material objects have to be seen not
>just as sets of sense-data, but as *possibilities* of causing sense-data
>(cf. Mill with his view of matter as permanent possibility of sensation).

(Does anyone have a philosopher-to-English dictionary handy? :-)

What does this have to do with the man/machine debate?  Any object
that can generate sensations for humans can also generate sensations
for any robot equipped with the requisite sensors.
--
_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi				NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory
yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu		Robotic Intelligence Group
_______________________________________________________________________________


