From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Fri May 28 2004 - 18:59:53 EDT
Andy, This is a quick reply -- not sure how relevant this is to the list. Mind does not only consist of activities of the body. Mind is implemented in the body, but many mental processes require no bodily activity in the usual sense of the term, e.g. dreaming. Some readers thought Ryle was a behaviourist because he did seem to claim that, for example, "happiness" was not a state of mind, but simply a term that refers to a large set of counterfactual statements about observable activities, the kinds of activities that happy people normally perform. But although this may be a good theory of everyday language use it is an incomplete theory of happiness - for it is the case that types of happiness are types of mental state that we experience, and much of that experience is private and not observable in "outer bodily activity". I read the Copeland article some time ago and thought he was stretching things to claim that Turing did not believe that human intelligence is replicable by computing machines, particularly as Turing was one of the founders of AI and orginator of the famous Turing Test. Turing did claim that human mentality was a natural phenomenon that in principle we could replicate. Copeland's other statements regarding the hypothetical nature of the Church-Turing thesis are fine -- it is a thesis, not a theorem, it may be wrong, and we might need other kinds of mechanisms to replicate intelligence. I don't see any challenge to AI in the article, even one particular view of it. -Ian.
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