🚀 go-pugleaf

There really are questions which a Turing Machine, or other "pure
program" cannot answer, which real machines can: For example:

     What time is it?

In order to answer this question correctly, a program MUST BE DEPENDENT
ON THE HARDWARE upon which it is running.

In fact, to even "play the game", a machine must has I/O facilities,
such as the ability to set a bit which changes a measurable physical quantity
in the universe, or to read a bit which reflects one.

These facilities are definitely missing from Abstract Symbolic
Computing machines. (Which is precisely why there is a P (not an A) in
the PSSH.) I think anyone who has ever written a computer program
tacitly assumes an extended computational model with I/O facilities.

So, Searle, if he only knew, could actually win this on this one
little point.  So, I suggest the (mythological?) proponents of "Hard
AI" agree to these two bits of physical machine dependency. Why not?
Then it will be up to Searle to prove necessity of the FULL machine
dependency of his "Brains Only" stance.


--
Jordan Pollack                            Assistant Professor
CIS Dept/OSU                              Laboratory for AI Research
2036 Neil Ave                             Email: pollack@cis.ohio-state.edu
Columbus, OH 43210                        Fax/Phone: (614) 292-4890