From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Dualism
Date: 15 Oct 92 17:24:41 GMT
Article-I.D.: mp.1992Oct15.172441.30236
Organization: Northern Illinois University

In article <7707@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <1992Oct13.193732.71311@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
>>In article <7670@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>>>Why is it then that when I suggest that functional organization 
>>>(or, more generally, "how it works") should count, no one on the
>>>anti-Searle side says they agree?  The response has been so
>>>universally negative that I've more or less given up on trying
>>>to make that point.

The response has been "so universally negative" only because you choose
to interpret peoples responses as negative.

>>Well, I agree, for one.  I do believe, on the other hand, that *in the
>>universe we live in*, it is impossible to create a system which will pass
>>the TT but which is not actually intelligent.

That pretty well sums up my view too.

>It may surprise you, but I almost agree with this.

>....

>Similarly, if it had turned out that the only way to look like
>gold was to _be_ gold, if "fools gold" was impossible, then the
>simple visual test for gold would suffice.

>The situation we're in right now with the TT is that of people
>defending the visual test for gold in the absence of sufficiently 
>good reasons for concluding that it works.  

This is a bogus analogy.

>Of course, there are differences between gold and intelligence
>(or whatever).  I don't mean for the analogy to be exact.  (For
>instance, we don't know yet whether "fools consciousness" is
>actually possible.)

Exactly, and that makes all the difference.  The visual test of gold
would still be accepted as adequate if fools gold were merely a theoretical
possibility which was not know to actually exist.

>                     What I do mean is that there might be good
>arguments for the TT, but those are not (at least for the most part)
>the arguments we're seeing now.

Perhaps usenet article get distorted when they cross the atlantic.  But
I really have not seen many arguments - good or bad - for the TT.  I do
see people pointing out the errors in frequent attacks on TT.  And I
see you misinterpreting these articles as if they were arguing for the
TT.

>The internal dialogue, however, is an important part of our mental
>life.  ...

>So when people start to say that the internal dialogue, or qualia, or
>consciousness is an irrelevant detail, then it seems to me that we're
>just not interested in the same questions.  I have no objection to

I think there are very few people in this discussion who would not agree
that the internal dialogue is important.  However some of us believe that
the internal dialogue does affect behavior, and therefore is tested with
behavioural tests.  Whether those tests are foolproof is admittedly an
open question, but I don't think it a question worth spending much time on
until we have an actual candidate for strong AI.

>Moreover, given the current state of our knowledge, the TT is
>virtually useless as a test of the things I'm interested in
>and of the things at issue in the Searle debate.

Then why do you keep bringing it up?