yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) (01/11/90)
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 _______________________________________________________________________________