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From: llama@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Joseph A. Francis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: No more Chinese rooms, please?
Message-ID: <22928@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 27 Jun 90 17:42:55 GMT
References: <25445@cs.yale.edu> <1990Jun26.140923.22895@cs.umn.edu> <25457@cs.yale.edu>
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Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
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In article <25457@cs.yale.edu> blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko) writes:
>Just as civic pride is a property of a city, Searle takes consciousness
>and emotional states to be properties of the mind.  His claim (indeed
>his solution to the mind-body problem) is that these intentional
>properties are identically the states of the underlying processor --
>that when one reports that someone is hungry, for example, one is
>saying nothing other than that the current state of her neurons is one
>element of the subset of all neuron states that has been labelled
>"hungry".  Therefore, he claims, the information-transducing properties
>of an intelligent artificial entity do not suffice -- the artificial
>entity must also reproduce the relationship between physical states and
>mental states.

Ahh.  And here is the crux of the whole matter (to me at least).  While
others cite a variety of assumptions Searle makes in CR as the straw 
that breaks CR's back, I believe the following is a more telling problem:

I don't think the CR can function as per CR WITHOUT having mental states.
For instance, we would not say something passes the turing test if it
can never remember the last question you asked it - so clearly the inards
of CR do not have static comments -  the man in CR must not be just reading
symbols - applying rules from the book - and outputing symbols; he must 
also be WRITING things (in the book or on scrath paper or somewhere).
Also, this system as a whole must be able to learn new Chinese words, learn
how to play crazy eights and tic-tac-toe, and formulate opinions on the
validity of Searle's CR argument, etc...  The inards of CR are an 
extremely active, complicated, and evolving place.

I claim (without any support - just a claim) that doing all this 
neccessitates mental states, self awareness, thought, and so on.  So in
essence, if Searle insists his CR has no mental states, I assert CR is
impossible.  If Searle doesn't mind attributing mental states to CR,
then fine, but now he'll have to grant CR the property of intelligence.

-Joe