🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1519@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <12702@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> kpfleger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Karl Robert Pfleger) writes:
>>The reason everyone disagrees about the Searle article(s)/ideas is that
>>he doesn't provide any definitions and so people must supply their own.
>
>I think there's more to it than that.  For example, some people seem
>to feel that having the right behavior is all that could ever be asked
>as evidence of understanding.  In that case, I'd be tempted to say
>they have a losing definition of "understanding", but maybe they're
>just not interested in other sense of the word.

Why not use the behavioral definition of "understanding" (or more
broadly, the behavioral definitions of "intelligence" and
"consciousness)?

Even assuming that you use the introspective definitions of these
terms to determine that you are intelligent, conscious, and capable of
understanding, how do you determine that other human beings are
"intelligent" or "conscious" or "understand" anything?

Either because:

	(1) they have similar appearance (to you)
	(2) they have similar behavior (to you)

It has nothing to do with the biochemical nature of the neural
computation in a person's brain -- most people decide that other
humans are conscious entities without having to take a course in
neuroscience.  It also has nothing to do with trying to determine
whether another person has a formal semantics corresponing to his
linguistic syntax, except to the degree that those semantics might be
revealed through the person's behavior.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Brian Yamauchi				University of Rochester
yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu		Computer Science Department
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