Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!snorkelwacker!bu.edu!bucasb!reynolds From: reynolds@bucasd.bu.edu (John Reynolds) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: No more Chinese rooms, please? Message-ID: Date: 16 Jun 90 04:51:14 GMT References: <3285@usceast.UUCP< <2410@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU> <3287@usceast.UUCP> Sender: news@bu.edu.bu.edu Organization: Boston University Center for Adaptive Systems Lines: 49 In-reply-to: park@usceast.UUCP's message of 13 Jun 90 19:50:30 GMT In article <2410@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU> frank@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU (Frank Breen) wrote: Of course M [Searle] doesn't understand Chinese any-more than someone with half the speech centre of their brain missing would understand English. M is only a small part of the system - all the knowlege is stored in B [the room] and together M+B does understand Chinese. [I]ts only when you put it all together that it understands anything. Tell me if I'm right. park@usceast.UUCP (Kihong Park) replied: Yes, you are basically right. But ... [w]hat you're doing above is basically falling into a trap whereby you are engaging in a discussion as to the validity of the statement that there is some fundamental difference between biological information processing systems such as the brain and any other artificial, mechanical counterpart. reynolds@bucasd.bu.edu asks: Am I missing something? That's not the trap he's falling into at all. The idea that the components of a system acting in isolation may be unable to carry out some functions they can achieve when working together doesn't depend in any way on whether the components of that systems are biological or not. park@usceast.UUCP (Kihong Park) went on to add: But he is making a different mistake in formulating his Chinese room argument which everybody can agree on to be faulty. Namely, his main point is that the person in the room(M), since he is essentially performing a table-lookup operation, does not understand the content of the question/answers. This is true. But from a theoretical point of view, given book B(program) and person M(control unit), there exists an equivalent Turing machine T which has B hardwired in its circuitry, and hence a pointing of fingers to the book-keeping entity M is not possible anymore. If you read his original articles, you will see that his Chinese room argument rests entirely on being able to point to M as the culprit. But his example is incorrect for the above reason. It's just a consequence of ther existence of Universal Turing machines. reynolds@bucasd.bu.edu looks puzzled and types: I don't see your point. And so by removing Searle, who you say doesn't understand the content of the question/answers, and replacing him and his book with circuitry you put intelligence into the system? And in what way is M the culprit?