tombl (12/03/82)
I really do think Searle has gotten more mileage out of this than he deserves. As far as I am concerned, his latest contribution was his speech acts stuff. I recently had the chance to see Searle present the paper several people have mentioned. Several interesting notes: - he has backed off from some of the more definitive (read uninformed) claims that originally appeared in the Brains and Behavior (or whatever it is) article; - his presentation was very lively and entertaining -- in fact it was a great deal more entertaining than it was substantative; - Searle doesn't make one argument, he makes several. He never does define what he alludes to, and expects the listener grant as commonly understood, when he uses the term "meaning", as in the emotive meaning of thought (what do the words "Ayatollah Khomeini(sp?)" really "mean" to you?). He accuses AI researchers of ignoring this issue; in fact, any logical positivist in his own (Philosophy) department would deny that there was any such issue to address. - He claims that semantics (equivalently the "meaning" of words) can not be embedded in a formal system. At least he is willing to admit that he cannot prove this! - He makes an analogy between the chemistry of water and the structure of intelligence. Specifically, he admits that AI researchers are able to manipulate programs and properties of a system at the level corresponding to the molecular structure of water. The intelligent behavior we observe, a sequence of "mental states", corresponds to the macroscopic properties of water. (Incidentally, he spoke throughout as if these were conscious mental states; when I asked him about that, he immediately backed off). Searle maintains that the link between the two levels, and he does acknowledge that the lower has a causal relationship to the upper, is its embedding in the mind (whatever, dear heaven, that is), and that it certainly cannot be embedded in a silicon chip. He obviously doesn't know much about statistical mechanics either, or he would see the gaping hole in his own analogy. - Searle thinks his dog is intelligent. I can only hope he lives to become a victim of the Turing test. Generally speaking, I think the man suffers from the Weizenbaum Syndrome (guess what that is), and it is too bad he could not either keep up with the pace of his own profession, if that is the problem, or find an easy early out from what is not only a faulty, by markedly unconvincing argument. Tom Blenko decvax!teklabs!tekmdp!tombl ucbvax!teklabs!tekmdp!tombl tombl.tektronix@rand-relay