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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
Message-ID: <jqbD3uzpn.KA8@netcom.com>
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References: <3g673d$7pl@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3pFrv.DAp@spss.com> <jqbD3r4G1.F7r@netcom.com> <D3t1nG.6E5@spss.com>
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 23:24:59 GMT
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In article <D3t1nG.6E5@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>In article <jqbD3r4G1.F7r@netcom.com>, Jim Balter <jqb@netcom.com> wrote:
>>This discussion of course has implications for Searle's comments regarding
>>computers made of catgut and eggshells or whatever.
>
>I hate to defend Searle, but he was just making fun of the way that some
>AI types toss around "TM-equivalent".  Ideas in one discipline sometimes
>sound completely absurd to outsiders, who inevitably take theoretical 
>abstractions and shorthand simplifications as claims about reality.

No, he was arguing that if a computer can understand by virtue of being
TM-equivalent then so can catguts, with the apparent absurdity of the latter
implying an apparent absurdity of the former.

The fact is that AI types have very little use for the formalities regarding
brains and TM's beyond refuting arguments, such as Searle's, that attempt to
use them to show that computers *cannot* have various properties.  
-- 
<J Q B>

