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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas
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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 23:20:20 GMT
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In article <39ofgk$7rb@news-rocq.inria.fr> ziane@monica.inria.fr (Mikal Ziane (Univ. Paris 5 and INRIA) ) writes:
>Very interesing article from Aaron Sloman on Penrose's (likely) ignorance 
>of what AI is. It's amazing how people can overestimate their ability
>to understand a field with little effort.
>I suppose many people do that, but at least they don't write books or
>give talks on that, usually.

Perhaps I missed that article.  Could someone explain where Penrose's
(likely) ignorance of what AI is leads him astray?

Also, if it's mere ignorance that's the problem, why doesn't
someone just tell him the relevant stuff, problem solved?

>I am sure Searle has an even much more naive undertanding of AI than Penrose.
>I was amazed by one talk he once gave in Paris: he mainly made very
>superficial comparisons to defend his famous chinese room example.
>The rethoric tricks he used to convince the audience were appalling.
>The core of his argument was that semantics could not be achived by syntax
>and thus that computers could not deal with semantics !
>No justification of this point which seemed obvious to him
>(and quite wrong to me of course).

So how does that show he has a naive understanding of AI?

BTW, if you can see the point of the robot reply, you may be
able to see something of what Searle is getting at.  (Not that
Searle ever explains it very well, so far as I can tell.)

-- jd


