harnad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) (09/20/90)
The following article is retrievable by anonymous ftp as (compressed)
file otherminds.Z from directory /pub/harnad on princeton.edu
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Other bodies, other minds:
A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem
[To appear in: Minds and Machines 1: 1991]
Stevan Harnad
Department of Psychology
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544
ABSTRACT: Explaining the mind by building machines with minds runs
into the other-minds problem: How can we tell whether any body other
than our own has a mind when the only way to know is by BEING the other
body? In practice we all use some form of Turing Test: If it can DO
everything a body with a mind can do such that we can't tell them
apart, we have no basis for doubting it has a mind. But what is
"everything" a body with a mind can do? Turing's original "pen-pal"
version (the TT) only tested linguistic capacity, but Searle has shown
that a mindless symbol-manipulator could pass the TT undetected. The
Total Turing Test (TTT) calls for all of our linguistic AND robotic
capacities; immune to Searle's argument, it suggests how to ground a
symbol manipulating system in the capacity to pick out the objects its
symbols refer to. No Turing Test, however, can guarantee that a body
has a mind. Worse, nothing in the explanation of its successful
performance requires a model to have a mind at all. Minds are hence
very different from the unobservables of physics (e.g., quarks,
superstrings); and Turing Testing, though essential for
machine-modeling the mind, can really only yield an explanation of the
body.
KEYWORDS: artificial intelligence; causality; cognition; computation;
explanation; mind/body problem; other-minds problem; robotics; Searle;
symbol grounding; Turing Test.
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Other papers available from the same directory:
symbol.Z (The Symbol Grounding Problem, Physica D 1990)
searle.Z (Minds, Machines and Searle, J. Th. Exp. AI 1989)
categorization.Z (Category Induction and Representation, UP 1987)
Stevan Harnad Department of Psychology Princeton University
harnad@clarity.princeton.edu / harnad@pucc.bitnet / srh@flash.bellcore.com
harnad@learning.siemens.com / harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu / (609)-921-7771