Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uc!cs.umn.edu!hougen From: hougen@cs.umn.edu (Dean Hougen) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Chinese rooms? Summary: Don't get confused. Message-ID: <1990Jul2.224050.18551@cs.umn.edu> Date: 2 Jul 90 22:40:50 GMT References: <3446@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept. Lines: 46 In article <3446@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> jim@se-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Jim Ruehlin, Cognitologist domesticus) writes: >In article root@thespot.UUCP (Postmaster) writes: >>Pardon my ignorance, I just started reading this newsgroup... But, what >>are these 'Chinese Rooms' people keep talking about? > >Good question - most of us talking about them don't really know what they >are either! > >The 'Chinese Room' is an 'experiment' proposed by Searle in his paper >'Mind, Brains, and Programs' (I'm pretty sure that's the name of the paper, >but I may stand corrected - everyone nowadays refers to it simply as the >'Chinese Room Paper'). In it, Searle says that you can put a man in a >room with input and output slots, and lots of tables, translation books, ^^^^^^^^^^^ >etc. of Chinese characters (the man in the room is a non-Chinese speaker). > >On receiving Chinese characters as input, the man would look up conversion >tables that would tell him what Chinese characters to translate the input ^^^^^^^^^ >into, then put that translation into the output slot. > >The contention is that even though conversation performed in Chinese >characters looks like a real conversation, there's no 'understanding' on >the part of the room. You could put in a phrase (in Chinese) that says >'What do you think of Searle's paper?', and the response could be 'I think >it's a crock'. The man in the room only did symbol manipulations (like >a computer), so no understanding of the conversation is taking place. > >- Jim Ruehlin To the original poster: Don't let this description confuse you. The Chinese Room Argument is *NOT* about translations between languages. The conversation carried out by the room is carried out entirely in Chinese. I see a lot of wasted time and effort made by people arguing against misconceptions about what the Chinese Room Argument is (such as the argument that no exact translations can be made, so the room cannot exist). If you are really interested, look up the original article (preferably - and be sure to read the pear commentary) or at least his recent (within the last twelve months) Scientific American article. Dean Hougen -- "They say you're stupid, that you haven't got a brain." - Oingo Boingo