Harnad, Stevan (1991) Other bodies, Other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem. [Journal (Paginated)]
Full text available as:
![]() |
HTML
39Kb |
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., superstrings); and Turing Testing, though essential for machine-modeling the mind, can really only yield an explanation of the body.
Item Type: | Journal (Paginated) |
---|---|
Keywords: | artificial intelligence; causality; cognition; computation; explanation; mind/body problem; other-minds problem; robotics; Searle; symbol grounding; Turing Test. |
Subjects: | Psychology > Cognitive Psychology Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence Philosophy > Philosophy of Mind |
ID Code: | 1578 |
Deposited By: | Harnad, Stevan |
Deposited On: | 18 Jun 2001 |
Last Modified: | 11 Mar 2011 08:54 |
References in Article
Select the SEEK icon to attempt to find the referenced article. If it does not appear to be in cogprints you will be forwarded to the paracite service. Poorly formated references will probably not work.
Metadata
- ASCII Citation
- Atom
- BibTeX
- Dublin Core
- EP3 XML
- EPrints Application Profile (experimental)
- EndNote
- HTML Citation
- ID Plus Text Citation
- JSON
- METS
- MODS
- MPEG-21 DIDL
- OpenURL ContextObject
- OpenURL ContextObject in Span
- RDF+N-Triples
- RDF+N3
- RDF+XML
- Refer
- Reference Manager
- Search Data Dump
- Simple Metadata
- YAML
Repository Staff Only: item control page