Wayne%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Wayne McGuire) (10/10/86)
Date: Mon 29 Sep 86 09:55:11-PDT From: Pat Hayes <PHayes@SRI-KL.ARPA> Subject: Searle's logic Look, I also don't think there's any real difference between a human's knowledge of a horse and [a] machine's manipulation of the symbol it is using to represent it. At one end of the human knowledge spectrum we have that knowledge of a horse which is aware that two horses + two horses = four horses; at the other end is that sort of rich and unfathomably complex knowledge which is expressed in a play like Peter Shaffer's _Equus_, and which fuses, under the force of sympathetic imagination, conceptual, emotional, biological, and sensorimotor modes of cognition. I suppose that our most advanced expert systems at the elementary end of the cognitive spectrum can capture knowledge about the structural and functional features of a horse, but it is not clear that any knowledge representation scheme will EVER simulate what is most interesting about human cognition and which relies on unconscious and intuitive resources. In one dimension of cognition the world is a machine, an engineering diagram, which is readily accessible by bit twiddling models; in another, that of, say, Shakespeare, it is a living organism, whose parts are infinitely interconnected and partially decrypted only by the power of the imagination. And so I would argue, with regard to human and machine cognition of horses or anything else, that there is a major difference in any dimension of knowledge that counts, and that repairing automobiles or space stations, and writing or understanding poems (or understanding the world in the broadest sense), have nearly nothing in common. Wayne McGuire (wayne@oz.ai.mit.edu)