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Other bodies, other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem

Minds and Machines volume 1, pages 43–54 (1991)Cite this article

Abstract

Any attempt to explain the mind by building machines with minds must confront 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 of the Turing Test (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 instead 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, 08544, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Stevan Harnad

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  1. Stevan Harnad
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Harnad, S. Other bodies, other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem. Minds and Machines 1, 43–54 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00360578

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Keywords

  • Artificial intelligence
  • causality
  • cognition
  • computation
  • explanation
  • mind/body problem
  • other-minds problem
  • robotics
  • Searle
  • symbol grounding
  • Turing Test