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Article 5314 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas Clarke)
Subject: Re: Amusing Quotation
Message-ID: <1992Apr28.171433.11361@cs.ucf.edu>
Sender: news@cs.ucf.edu (News system)
Organization: University of Central Florida
References: <1992Apr27.135031.16536@cs.yale.edu>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1992 17:14:33 GMT

In article <1992Apr27.135031.16536@cs.yale.edu> mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU  
(Drew McDermott) writes:
> 
>   In article <1992Apr23.175901.1061@cs.ucf.edu> clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas  
Clarke) writes:
> 
>   >I came across the following in _Discrete thoughts : essays on mathematics,  
>   >science, and philosophy_ by Mark Kac,Gian-Carlo Rota, and Jacob T.  
Schwartz.   
>   >[Boston :Birkhauser, 1986] The quotations are from Rota (a combinatorist).
>   >
>   >  The computer is just an instrument for doing faster what we already know  
how  
>   >to do slower.  All pretension to computer intelligence and  
paradise-tomorrow  
>   >promise should be toned down before the public turns away in disgust.  And  
if  
>   >that should happen, our civilization might not survive.(p 263)
> 
> At the risk of overreacting to a quote out of context, let me point
> out the obvious fallacy: On any given occasion, a computer does faster
> what we already know how to do slower.  But it is likely that the the
> task it is being asked to do would never have been thought of if all
> previous exploration in the given domain had been done at the original
> slow speed.  In other words, at the point where we turn on the first
> paradisaical intelligent program, it will be the case that we "already
> know" how to generate intelligence computationally.  But that doesn't
> imply that we already know now.
> 
>                                              -- Drew McDermott

I have been thinking about this quotation and I think it may contain the germ
of a way to clearly express the CR argument in the spirit of your challenge.

Something along the lines that the person in the Chinese room is merely  
carrying out operations that we all know well how to do.  Now speed up his
operations to the point that a translation takes something less than geologic  
time.  The CR is now performing an operation that we don't all know how to do  
since introspection of language understanding is notoriously unproductive.  

What happened?  Is it a miracle requiring new types of physical structures  
(Searle, Penrose and others)?  Is it just a prosaic example of emergent  
complexity (most computer scientists, I think)?  How can we best think about  
and understand this phenomena that appears to be purely a result of doing  
simple things fast?


