🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <14266@cs.yale.edu> blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko) writes:
   First, Searle has had quite a distinguished and productive career as a
   philosopher independent of anything he has written about AI.

No one is making fun of his career as a philosopher.  Everyone knows that he
studied philosophy and was a Rhodes scholar and has written several books
on various subjects, etc.  This doesn't mean that he knows what he's talking
about when it comes to AI or computers.  His simple-minded and ill-motivated
attack [he used to say that he was out to get those who waste valuable
grant money on "useless" studies] on connectionist and parallelism approach
to AI is yet another proof that he's just what he has been all along --
a hack.

   Second, it is evident to anyone who has done some homework where
   Searle's concerns originated. Indeed, he himself adopted the
   functionalist view of meaning early on, and moved to a different view
   subsequently.  He has even gone to the trouble of writing a book to
   discuss the latter point of view!

He's not the only one who's done this -- there are numerous examples of
the same story -- people who started out as a skeptic but turned into
a true believer and talk ad nauseam about their revelations.  What's the point?
Does this turn-of-his-positions make his ignorant criticisms any more valid?

   I think that conduct in this newsgroup of late has been disgraceful.  I
   strongly doubt that several respondants have read the article(s) in
   question, and it is quite clear that most have failed to understand
   what they say (never mind arguments about whether the position
   presented is correct or defensible). And now it has moved from the
   level of sophistry contributed by the uninformed to the higher plane of
   attacks on Searle's professional standing mounted by the profoundly
   ignorant.  I think the readership is entitled to some relief.

You certainly have a very negative view of the readership in this newsgroup.
On the contrary, I strongly believe that everyone in this newsgroup has 
at one time another (if not in the Jan issue of Scientific American) read
Searle's Chinese Room blather and probably by now sick and tired of its
retarded rhetorics.  After all, he's been dwelling on it since 1981 without
ever adequately responding to his critics [I sincerely think that he doesn't
even understand some of the best arguments presented to him over the years
since he first brought up this Chinese Room nonsense; he simply chooses
to pick on less elegant/powerful arguments and decline to comment on the
rest -- as he did in his Scientific American article -- he doesn't even attempt
to properly address the criticisms in the accompanying article in the same
issue of the magazine, the luminuous room article.]  Hofstadter and Dennett
have shattered the Chinese Room on every point long ago.  Go look them up
on your bookshelves.

   While I doubt that this was its intent, I sometimes believe Searle's
   Minds, Brains, and Programs has become an intelligence test for the AI
   community. This is unfortunate.

This is truly laughable.  Most of us believe that the responses to Searle's
Chinese Room have become a litmus test for its critics.

hwajin
--
Hwa Jin Bae, Wind River Systems, Emeryville CA
hwajin@wrs.com  (uunet!wrs!hwajin)