Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!rutgers!rochester!cornell!oravax!daryl
From: daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: No more Chinese rooms, please?
Summary: filler filler filler
Message-ID: <1583@oravax.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jul 90 13:37:54 GMT
References: <25422@cs.yale.edu> <593@ntpdvp1.UUCP> <31329@cup.portal.com>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca NY
Lines: 35

In article <593@ntpdvp1.UUCP> kenp@ntpdvp1.UUCP (Ken Presting) writes:
>       Searle is trying to prove the following:
>
>       For any program P whatsoever, and for any machine M whatsoever,
>       the following inference is always invalid:
>
>       Machine M runs Program P, therefore Machine M understands.
>

If Searle were only trying to show that the inference above is
invalid, then I would have no further argument with him; he would be
correct. Furthermore, his Chinese Room argument would indeed be a
convincing argument: If Machine M is the man in the Chinese room, then
for any program P, the man could run program P and still not
understand Chinese.

However, the validity of the above inference is not claimed by Strong
AI (or if it is, then they are just speaking loosely). The more
precise claim would be that, for the right program P, one can infer

       Machine M runs Program P, therefore the system (Machine M running
       Program P) understands.

This is closer to the strong AI position, and it seems that Searle has
no good argument against it. For the Chinese room to count as an
argument against this claim, it would be necessary to establish that
the system (man + rules + room) does not understand Chinese. And
Searle cannot establish this without offering *some* definition of
what it means for a system to understand. (Comment: Searle's variant
of having the man memorize the rules does not change anything; there
would still be two systems: the man "acting himself" and the man
following the rules. Establishing that one system does not understand
does not automatically establish that the other doesn't.)

Daryl McCullough