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Article 4944 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: SHRDLU's mind
Message-ID: <1992Apr6.224129.7406@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu>
Date: 6 Apr 92 22:41:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: organpip.1992Apr6.224129.7406
References: <6737@pkmab.se> <1992Apr5.210553.11966@psych.toronto.edu> 
 <1992Apr6.023638.518@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> <1992Apr6.182533.109@psych.toronto.edu>
Sender: news@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu
Reply-To: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
Organization: Center for Neural Systems, Memory, and Aging
Lines: 50

Bill Skaggs:
>  I think I'm a backer of strong AI, but I don't believe that
>mind is an all-or-nothing concept.  Minds come in varying degrees
>of sophistication.  

Christopher Green:
>Varying degrees of sophistication have no bearing on the question of
>presence or absense.  A small mind is still a mind, just as a small ball
>is still a ball.

  Is a single molecule of rubber a ball?  How many molecules of
rubber does it take to make a ball?

  I believe that all natural concepts are fuzzy at the edges.  For
prototypical exemplars presence and absence are clear, but there
are always doubtful exemplars where presence or absence is a
matter of degree.  

  I like to think of SHRDLU as having mind to a very small degree,
and a thermostat as having an "atom" of mind.  A rock, because it
contains no representation of the world and does not communicate
or act purposefully, has no mind at all.

BS:
>The essential ingredients are a picture of
>the world, the ability to use it to accomplish goals, and some
>ability to communicate.  

CG:
>This is all very appealing, but all very vague as well. Longuet-Higgens
>(or however it's spelled) once built a little toy robot that used a
>square of paper to (mechanically) keep track of where it was on a table
>top. When it got to the edge of the paper, it would stop moving. This also
>happened to be (no counterfactual support here) when it was at thee edge
>of the table as well. This seems to satisfy your description. Would you
>credit it with a mind? (Try not to say 'no' simply because it can't 
>communicate. Stopping might be considered communication that it is at
>the edge of the table, just as much a the whining of a dog is.)

Well, it seems to me that the concept of mind is intrinsically
somewhat vague.

I don't quite understand the description of the robot.  Does 
the robot have some sort of representation of its position?  Does
it move according to some plan?  Or does it just move randomly
around on the paper until it comes to the edge?  The answers
to these questions determine how much mind I would be willing
to attribute to the robot (but very little in any case).

	-- Bill


