http://cogprints.org/id/eprint/1578 2011-03-11T08:54:40Z info:eu-repo/semantics/descriptiveMetadata Other bodies, Other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem Harnad, Stevan Cognitive Psychology Artificial Intelligence Philosophy of Mind 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. 1991 Journal (Paginated) PeerReviewed text/html http://cogprints.org/1578/1/harnad91.otherminds.html Harnad, Stevan (1991) Other bodies, Other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem. [Journal (Paginated)] http://cogprints.org/1578/ info:eu-repo/semantics/objectFile info:eu-repo/semantics/humanStartPage