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From: ascott@egreen.iclnet.org (Alan Scott - CIR)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
Message-ID: <1994Nov30.163041.10957@egreen.wednet.edu>
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Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 16:30:41 GMT
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In article <JMC.94Nov22011226@white.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il>,
McCarthy John <jmc@white.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il> wrote:
>Imagine that the procedure that the man in the Chinese room were performing
>unbeknownst to him were simulating an abacus rather than translating Chinese.
>Would the Searle argument then prove that a machine can't do arithmetic?
>
>I think that isn't Searle's problem, but I'm sleepy right now.

John is right.  Searle's problem, as I see it (and I have read the
original essay as reprinted in _The Mind's I_, ed. by D. Hofstadter &
someone else), is that Searle doesn't understand what the Turing test is,
or what it's supposed to prove.  It's when Searle uses the phrase "the
Turing test for Chinese" that he betrays his limited understanding.  The
Turing test is an *open-ended* and essentially subjective examination of
the responses of a mind or imitation thereof.  There is no test "for
Chinese"; a Turing-capable machine might well respond "How the hell do I
know?" to a question about any specific topic, or start arguing with you
about whether Chinese is a language or a set of languages, or even go off
on a diatribe about Searle and the fact that he wouldn't know intelligence
if it came out of its black box/skull and bit him. 

Alan Scott
studying *real hard* to pass the Turing Test



