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Article 1695 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Arguments against Machine Intelligence
Message-ID: <5733@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 27 Nov 91 21:30:41 GMT
References: <43772@mimsy.umd.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 21

In article <43772@mimsy.umd.edu> kohout@cs.umd.edu (Robert Kohout) writes:
>The most frequent response to this challenge is an appeal to semantics,
>which generally also implies an appeal to consciousness. These arguments
>most commonly involve an intuition that 'meanings' cannot be conveyed
>by formal digit flipping. Why not? and even if this is true, why are
>such representations required for intelligent behavior? 

The Chinese Room is not an argument that intelligent behavior
is impossible.  As you know:

>   Please don't
>offer up the Chinese Room, for not only is it a flawed argument at the
>most basic level, but is presumes an intelligent machine for the purposes
>of demonstrating that the symbol cruncher cannot be said to 'understand'
>anything.

Indeed, I don't think any of the arguments recently presented in
this newsgroup were arguments that the behavior would be impossible.

So if all you care about is the behavior, then those arguments are
irrelevant to your interests.


