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From: gordon@photon.tamu.edu (Dan Gordon)
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: more Chinese Room
Message-ID: <4090@helios.TAMU.EDU>
Date: 16 Jan 90 15:22:51 GMT
References: <2602@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> <1527@skye.ed.ac.uk> <4921.25ad37f7@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk> <1585@uniol.UUCP> <IZgfAce00W0TI8fVok@andrew.cmu.edu>
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In article <IZgfAce00W0TI8fVok@andrew.cmu.edu> jb3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jon Allen Boone) writes:
]schwuchow@uniol.UUCP (Michael Schwuchow) writes:
]> 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
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]> >syntactic knowledge, they deduced the semantic content.  Isn't this exactly
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]> >what Searle says cannot be done?  Code-breakers (for example Turing :-) must
]> >have to do a similar task.

Not true. The breakthrough in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics came with
the discovery of the famous Rosetta (sp?) stone, which had text in 3 different
languages, two of them being Egyptian and ancient Greek.