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From: marky@caen.engin.umich.edu (Mark Anthony Young)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, Strong AI, and Chinese Rooms
Message-ID: <1990Nov16.072113.8943@engin.umich.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 90 07:21:13 GMT
References: <1990Nov15.204949.12075@Solbourne.COM>
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In article <1990Nov15.204949.12075@Solbourne.COM> vic@corona.Solbourne.COM (Vic Schoenberg) writes:
> [In some other article someone else writes:]
>>	Searle tries to avoid this so-called Systems Reply by imagining yet
>> another (impossible) situation, in which the person in the room memorizes all
>> the rules for manipulating the symbols. His argument is nearly unbelievably
>> naive: "There is nothing in the 'system' that is not in me, and since I don't
>> understand Chinese, neither does the system."
>>	The consequences of this statement are absurd: If his statement is
>> correct, then he has proven nothing more, than that it should be possible
>> for a person ignorant of Chinese to pass the Turing test for speaking
>> Chinese. 
>
>This is one of the points Searle wished to establish, that the Turing
>Test is inadequate.
>
My interpretation of Searle's reply here is that it should be possible for
someone who doesn't understand Chinese to speak it in a way indistinguishable
from someone who does understand, simply by memorizing the rules from the
Chinese room.  Of course, if we were carrying on a conversation with someone
in Chinese, and that person claimed not to understand the language, we would
hardly believe him.  If Searle persisted in claiming that he didn't understand
Chinese, in spite of carrying on perfectly fluent conversation therein, we 
would question his sanity before his understanding.  Thus Searle's claim that
the system does not understand seems far-fetched.

So the Turing test is only inadequate as a theory of understanding (can it
even be called a theory of understanding?).  It is perfectly adequate as a
test of understanding.

>Recall that the very purpose of the Turing Test is to establish an operational
>test for intelligence, bypassing any attempt to agree on the definition of
>what intelligence is, or what it means to understand a language. With the
>Turing Test, we have a mathematician's attempt to bypass these sticky
>questions of philosophy. It isn't surprising that a philosopher should
>be unamused. To a philosopher of mind, this end run around the main
>issues of the day isn't acceptable. Searle isn't satisfied with an
>operational definition of intelligence because this doesn't address the
>issues of subjectivity, qualia, the problem of other minds, and so
>forth that are central to the human experience and constitute the core
>unsolved problems of this area of philosophic study.

Since the Turing test doesn't address these issues, and was never meant to,
isn't it irrelevent to them?  Turing wasn't trying to help us understand
what understanding is, only to help us recognise it.  Why does Searle spend
so much time and effort criticising something that has no bearing on what
he's interested in?  

...mark young