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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <3g673d$7pl@mp.cs.niu.edu> <jqbD3r4G1.F7r@netcom.com> <D3t1nG.6E5@spss.com> <jqbD3uzpn.KA8@netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 1995 23:02:53 GMT
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In article <jqbD3uzpn.KA8@netcom.com>, Jim Balter <jqb@netcom.com> wrote:
>In article <D3t1nG.6E5@spss.com>, Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com> wrote:
>>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.  

Doesn't it work the other way around?  Why, after all, does Searle talk
about computers made of "toilet paper and... small stones" (to quote from
his original BBS article)?  Because he read about it in Weizenbaum.
