What I do feel was captured in song in the long running Broadway musical,
<A Chorus Line>, "I feel nothing." I understand nothing. That sort
of talk made no sense when I was a kid and it makes no sense now. But now
I know I can say that and make that stick.
I'm interested in Walker Percy because he had considerable training in the
biomedical sciences, more than dabbled in psychiatry, payed some attention
to philosophical issues and the history of philosophy, had strong religious
beliefs and wrote great yarns bringing these threads into a pattern that's
fun to explore with undergraduates. Pretty interesting combination of
interests and talents. But risky.
Not at all easy to train and keepall those tigers in one cage.
Particularly if you let them grow up and behave like mature tigers.
The Turing Test may well NOT be the crux of the matter.
Philosopher John Searle certainly doesn't think so. He's hardly alone.
Thomas Nagel agrees. What's it like to understand Chinese? or to forage
by echolocation? Searle and Nagel insist we can't find that out by
"walking and talking" (answering questions or producing translations in
idiomatic Chinese) like Chinese, or discovering how bats see in the dark.
The advantage of the Turing Test model is only that it is very clear and
very logical. That makes it an interesting tool to have in your tool
kit. The same can be said for the anti-behaviorist, anti-strong AI
arguments of Searle and Nagel.
Searle claims he knows what it would be like to understand Chinese and he
knows he doesn't. He has strong (not overly technical) arguments why
programming him to behave as if he understood Chinese wouldn't result in
his really understanding it.
Like most such arguments, his are largely negative: computers and computer
programs have the basic linguistic properties of syntax and semantics only
insofar as they stand in certain relations to engineers and programmers.
That leaves a huge gaping question.
How do engineers and programmers have linguistic skills including those of
grammar and interpretation? Searle's answer: they have brains and their
brains evolved.
Would Peirce disagree? would Percy?
What do we do with the tigers? Anaesthesia?
ez ed