depth first search

I’ve been reading a lot of Searle recently. Searle bashing seems to be a popular pastime among young graduate students in AI, but I admit to a certain sympathy with his argument. I recently read about analogue computing in The New Turing Omnibus which reminded me of one of Searle’s central claims, that the locus of computation matters.

To Searle, a program doesn’t produce artificial intelligence, a program running somewhere produces artificial intelligence. Not only that, but a program running in the wrong place won’t actually produce intelligence, but maybe only the simulation of intelligence, or worse, a bunch of noise (image a computer constructed from beer cans).

To me the argument divides into two parts:

1. How universal is computation?
2. How universal is intelligence?

Searle claims that intelligence is less universal than computation. You can construct a Turing machine out of beer cans, but you can’t construct a thinking machine out of beer cans (but maybe you can construct a machine that simulates thinking out of beer cans). I believe the Church-Turing thesis, but I’m not yet convinced that intelligence is quite so universal.