Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!udel!princeton!phoenix!eliot
From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Hayes vs. Searle
Message-ID: <17102@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 9 Jun 90 22:37:20 GMT
References: <16960@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <2687@skye.ed.ac.uk> <17046@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <36091@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Reply-To: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 55

In article <36091@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> martin@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (david l. martin) writes:
;In article <17046@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes:
;
;>He [Searle] could have 1,000,000 helpers and it wouldn't make any difference.
;>The chinese room argument uses the word "understand" in two different 
;>ways: Searle doesn't understand the chinese language, and Searle doesn't 
;>understand the import of the symbols he's manipulating. If it's possible to 
;>encode all answers to any possible question via rules without referents, 
;>as is posited by the book of rules Searle has in hand, then the chinese 
;>language itself (or any other language) is just as plausibly a bunch of 
;>rules, nothing more.  Searle manipulating rules doesn't understand; therefore 
;>Searle speaking English is really just manipulating rules of the english 
;>language and isn't therefore understanding English, which is absurd.  
;>Conclusion, rules insufficient for encoding of language as is commonly 
;>used: therefore Searle Chinese rule book can't exist, end of argument.
;
;This seems a confused line of argument to me.  You seem to be saying that
;_if_ the Chinese language can be captured in a rule book, then the English
;language can be captured in a rule book, and moreover, it _must be_ that
;Searle is just manipulating rules when he speaks English, which leads to
;a contradiction.  

I only said Searle PLAUSIBLY is manipulating rules (in being Searle), 
because if the Book exists then clearly the structure of discourse can 
be described via a set of rules (as many and as complicated as you like). 
It's not out of the question, that's all, in which case it's not claer to me
that the dual distinctions of understanding necessarily pertain. If it were
absolutely clear that understanding could NOT be rule-based, then the book
couldn't exist, in which case the argument is vacuous. If understanding CAN
be rule-based, then Searles's distinction is empty and the systems argument
wins. Searle, after all, is just an IO device.

;Secondly, and more important, the assumption that the Chinese rule book
;could exist is just that - an assumption made for the purposes
;of a reductio argument.  

Yes, but it's an assumption whose implications aren't necessarily
restricted to the book itself -- I'm trying to show that one of these
implications affects Searle.

;For a computer program to pass the Turing test in
;Chinese, some set of rules about responding to Chinese would have to be laid
;down in the program (that's just what the program would be).  
;Let's grant that, Searle says, and then ask whether the computer
;understands.  It seems to me that if you don't won't to grant that,
;it's true that Searle's argument doesn't get off the ground, but it's
;also true that you've already ruled out the possibility of a computer
;passing the Turing test in the first place.

Not really! What I doubt is that the Turing test can be used to ascertain
an intentionality in the machine -- conversation is only one aspect
of intelligence, not necessarily its substrate. We'll never know if anything
is conscious (cats or octopi or Searle) until it becomes possible (if ever) to
experience it directly. Until then we're stuck to ATTRIBUTING intentional
states to other organisms or to machines.