🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5319@star.cs.vu.nl> xerox@cs.vu.nl (J. A. Durieux) writes:

> I think one has to have thought about [ Searle's ] points of view before 
> in order to have them "resonate", and to understand them. (I don't
> feel able to state them better, by the way.) ...

> My opinion is, that behaviour has simply a too small bandwidth to
> be able to distinguish understanding and not-understanding
> systems *in principle*...

The problem with this argument is that it is too powerful. If you
accept it, you must also abandon any beliefs you may have that 
_other people_ have minds. 

I've tried to understand the Chinese Room argument, and failed. It 
seems to be based on a simple refusal to understand basic technical
and/or philosophical points. This may seem implausible, given that Searle 
is supposedly competent, but I have no better hypothesis. The topic
seems to induce nonsense all around, as with the "refutation" that 
conventional programs can't understand, but neural networks might.

Let us suppose that a machine is constructed that can at least mimic
all human intellectual and emotional behaviour. Whether this is possible
is an empirical question, but Searle appears willing to hypothesize that
it is. Will people consider the machine to be a "person", endowed with
attributes such as intelligence and morality? This too is an empirical
question. If they've had long conversations with it, heard it describe
its hopes and fears, had it help them with their personal problems, etc.
I think most people would consider it a person, but some might not, if
they knew how it was implemented. Finally, one might ask whether one
_should_ consider it a person. This is a moral question, similar to 
that of whether one should consider members of other races to be people.
There is nothing logically inconsistent in Searle answering this question
in the negative, but once it is seen in this light, the argument looses
all force for those who do not share his prejudices.

    Radford Neal