From: cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Simulated Brain
Date: 13 Oct 92 23:31:38 GMT
Organization: Edinburgh University

In article <1992Oct12.220803.15594@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>In article <1992Oct12.185533.6092@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>In article <1992Oct12.170930.9523@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu 
>>(Marvin Minsky) writes:
>>>In article <26609@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:

>>>>Contrary to popular opinion, even Searle of Chinese Roon fame agrees with 
>>>>that, as he made plain in the Jan 1990 edition of Scientific American>>

>>>That a mere machine could think?  I don't remember any such statement
>>>by Searle.

He's made it several times, and he has said clearly and explicitly that
_computers_ could think. Odd how people fail to notice!

>>How about this, from the first paragraph of said article (I keep a copy
>>handy for use in comp.ai.philo polemics):

>>  "Can a machine think?  Can a machine have conscious thoughts in exactly
>>   the same sense that you and I have?  If by 'machine' one means a physical
>>   system capable of performing certain functions (and what else can one
>>   mean?), then humans are machines of a special biological kind, and humans
>>   can think, and so of course machines can think.  And, for all we know, it
>>   might be possible to produce a thinking machine out of different materials
>>   altogether-- say, out of silicon chips or vacuum tubes.  Maybe it will
>>   turn out to be impossible, but we certainly do not know that yet."

>>In _Minds, Brains, and Science_ he adds green slime to the array of
>> potentially mind-causing materials.

>Well, I don't want to nit-pick, but this doesn't distinguish between
>'machine' and anything else -- nor does it suggest what might be
>special about 'biological' ones.  Generally, I think most people reserve
>the term machine for a collection of objects assembled in an
>especially "insulationist" manner -- that is, in such a way that those
>'functions' are realized in a particularly reductionist way, in accord
>with the how the functions of the parts interact in accord with how
>they are assembled.  But what the heck, he had to leave room for the
>green slime.

Searle quite clearly has said that he thinks it is obvious that a
digital computer could think, just that it couldn't do so solely by
virtue of running a program.

Here's the relevant quote from the reply by Searle to critics in the
original 1980 BBS airing of the arguments.

"`Could a machine think?'

"... yes. We are precisely such machines.

"`... could a ... man-made machine think?'

[Searle answers yes, obviously, just by duplicating all the biological
machinery.]

"`Ok, but could a digital computer think?'

"If by "digital computer" we mean anything at all which has a level of
description where it can be correctly described as the instantiation of
a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we
are the instantiation of any number of computer programs and we can
think.

"`But could something think, understand, etc, _solely_ by virtue of
being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a
program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient
condition of understanding?'

"This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused
with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is "no".

[My quotation comes from p300 of Haugeland's "Mind Design".]

So clearly Searle has thought this way -- i.e., as he _explicitly_ says
above, that a digital computer could think -- for at least a dozen
years, and a _dozen_years_ago_ was complaining in print of exactly the
sort of misunderstanding of his views which has characterised most of
the discussions of the Searle in this newsgroup since its inception.

-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh          +44 (0)31 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205