Xref: utzoo comp.ai:5569 sci.philosophy.tech:1926
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!unido!uniol!schwuchow
From: schwuchow@uniol.UUCP (Michael Schwuchow)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: more Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1585@uniol.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jan 90 12:23:27 GMT
References: <2602@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> <1527@skye.ed.ac.uk> <4921.25ad37f7@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Oldenburg, W-Germany
Lines: 45

ian@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk writes:

>Rather than an argument, I will proffer an example of such a phenomenon.
>From time to time, during human history, writings from long-extinct
>civilisations have been found (for example Mayan codices, Runes or Egyptian
>hieroglyphics).  All the information that the translators had to work with
>were the rules they could deduce from the information.  With just this
>syntactic knowledge, they deduced the semantic content.  Isn't this exactly
>what Searle says cannot be done?  Code-breakers (for example Turing :-) must
>have to do a similar task.

>Ian Finch
>---------

IMHO the code-breaking of Mayan codices, Egyption hieroglyphics and so on
is not only based on syntactic knowledge, but on known semantics too.
I will specify this a bit:
The Mayas, the Egyptians are humans too. So you can suppose about what they
had written. Their culture is not totally lost, but relicts were traduced.
So you can fix some words like king, duke ,servant, slave; sun, water, rain,
moon, season; build, fight, govern; saw, grow, harvest, ... relatively
easy, because you can suppose, what a text could mean. Sometimes the words
are even pictures, which show, what they mean.

Suppose you get a message from extraterrestrian non-human intelligent
beeings. Some information transmitted in an unusual form. I think we could
not translate it by the syntax. A translation would suppose, that there are
parts included like
}Hey you out there! Are you intelligent too? Would you like to send letters?
}Send them to adress ...
And it might be, that there is a translation possible, that includes the
information of these statements. But how should we know, we are right??


And what would you suppose they think about us, if we send them back some
chinese poems?

thinking (at least i think so)
Micha
--
------Lieber ein Fachdilettant, als ein Universalidiot--------------
! Nickname: michel                     UUCP: schwuchow@uniol.UUCP  !
! Realname: Michael Schwuchow (biological version)                 !
! Position: Oldenburg, FRG             EARN: 122685@DOLUNI1        !
--------------------------------------------------------------------