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

Harnad, S. (1991) Other bodies, Other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem. Minds and Machines, 1 . pp. 43-54.

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Abstract

Explaining the mind by building machines with minds runs into 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 (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 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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