Xref: utzoo comp.ai:5612 sci.philosophy.tech:1946 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!amdahl!kp From: kp@uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.philosophy.tech Subject: Re: more Chinese Room Message-ID: <3f3i02V=80tK01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> Date: 18 Jan 90 22:30:59 GMT References: <2602@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> <1527@skye.ed.ac.uk> <4921.25ad37f7@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk> <1585@uniol.UUCP> <4941.25b48ec4@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk> Reply-To: kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA Lines: 39 In article <4941.25b48ec4@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk> ian@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk writes: >In article <1585@uniol.UUCP>, schwuchow@uniol.UUCP (Michael Schwuchow) writes: >> IMHO the code-breaking of Mayan codices, Egyption hieroglyphics and so on >> is not only based on syntactic knowledge, but on known semantics too. >> 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. >> >But, you would need to know something of Chinese culture to perform >translation. One verb in English may be translated in several ways in >Chinese, dependant on the status of the participants. To translate this, >there would be rules describing the relationships between kings, dukes, >servants and slaves. Thus, some semantic knowledge must be included in the >syntatic knowledge. The Chinese Room argument doesn't really depend on the operator being ignorant of Chinese. Of course, Searle makes a big deal out of it, but IMHO that is a symptom of his argument's being directed more toward our prejudices than toward our reason. Suppose the rule book for transforming input into output were written in Chinese, and the operator were a native speaker. The process occurring in the room would still be entirely syntactic. Searle shouldn't need any more than this to draw his intended conclusion - that the operation of the room lacks crucial attributes of mental processes, namely semantics. The situation remains the same if a Chinese speaker memorizes Chinese rules and uses them to transform verbal inputs into spoken outputs. The transformation is stil based entirely on syntax. To object to the Chinese Room argument on the grounds that the room is not really semantics-free, it's necessary to present examples of semantic operations entering into the procedures specified in the rules. A rule such as "If the input is , then look at your watch and select symbol based on the hour and symbol based on the minute". Such a rule has semantic content because the terms "hour", "minute", and "your watch" do not refer to symbols or symbol-types.