Joseph Hopkins - Jul 2, 2012:
well if it has to match that then it is in fact thinking.
I agree with the earlier replies in this threat that: (1) The Turing Test concept is very outdated and is impractical; (2) Thinking is not just mapping patterns or symbols, but rather it involves understanding. Surely nobody believes that a two-layer feedforward artificial neural network that can only map its statistically learned patterns correctly is “thinking” or that it “understands” what it’s doing. I agree with Jeff Hawkins regarding Searle’s Chinese Room, in that a truly intelligent entity will be intelligent even in the absence of any demonstrated behavior, or equivalently, that intelligence is not defined by behavior (e.g., mapping, matching) but rather by “understanding”...
As I looked around my office that day, I saw familiar chairs, posters, windows, plants, pencils, and so on. There were hundreds of items and features all around me. My eyes saw them as I glanced around, yet seeing them didn’t cause me to perform any action. No behavior was invoked or required, yet somehow I “understood” the room and its contents. I was doing what Searle’s Chinese Room couldn’t do, and I didn’t have to pass anything back through a slot. I understood, but had no action to prove it. What did it mean to “understand”?
(“On Intelligence”, Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee, 2004)
Where I differ from Hawkins’ opinion is that I believe understanding is more than prediction (his main hypothesis), since a person seeing a new object can still “understand” that object in terms of its visible attributes, even though there hasn’t been any experience with which to make predictions on that object.