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From: thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese room and stuff
Message-ID: <1990Nov24.210756.22801@cs.umn.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 90 21:07:56 GMT
References: <12160.274a7a65@ccvax.ucd.ie>
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept.
Lines: 102

In article <12160.274a7a65@ccvax.ucd.ie> tskelly@ccvax.ucd.ie writes:
>
>
>Good day to y'all,
>
>First order of business is to say that I am a relatively new newser and
>have probably missed a lot of the discussion on the subject of Searle's
>Chinese room - so, apologies, in advance, to anyone whose toes I step on!!
>
>Now, down to the main business!
>From the few postings that I have read on this topic I have to say I'm
>very dissapointed with the fact that nearly everybody seems to have
>missed the point.
>To illustrate, imagine an ENGLISH room! ( I know there are reasons why
>Searle chose to use Chinese but I trust the readers of this will understand
>them and also understand why I choose to use English!!).
>
>[Claims that the English room does nothing but manipulate symbols,
> while an intelligent entity, in addition to being able to manipulate
> symbols, also understands the meanings of the symbols.]
>
>Now, I don't want to labour the point so I'll say no more on that one and
>trust that you understand what I mean (which is more than the ENGLISH room
>could do!)

I like the idea of an English Room; I think it easier to visualize and
less likely to inadvertantly lead to inaccurate thinking.

I do not follow your argument that the English Room is merely symbol
manipulation while an intelligent entity understands things.  On
what do you base that?  To put it more simply, I can imagine a few
possible meanings:

1.  Humans understand, programs only manipulate symbols.  Therefore,
we can always tell a human from a program by testing for understanding,
and therefore no program can ever pass the Turing Test.

2.  It is possible for a program to imitate humanity by manipulating
symbols, but we know that it is only imitating intelligence and
understanding, while we know that humans understand.  (Here I must
ask, "How do we know that humans understand?  And how do we know
that a specific human understands a specific thing, other than
by asking the human questions on the topic?  How do we then know
that the human understands, and has not simply assimilated some
symbol manipulation rules and is producing correct answers to
our questions without actual understanding?")

3.  We know that programs do not understand anything because they
only manipulate symbols.  We consider it possible that humans are
intelligent, since the principles of their behavior are not known.
However, should it become known that humans do no more than
symbol manipulation, we would then conclude that they do not
in fact understand things.

It is perfectly possible that I have erred, and that your position
is not one of these three.  Please tell me which of these three you
are arguing from, or give me a better idea of what you actually
think.  If you are arguing from position 2 above, I would also
appreciate it if you would answer the questions I have provided.

>
>Another interesting point that has occured to me is this :
>Suppose Searle's Chinese room was created on 1/1/1800 and was sealed
>except for the input slot and the output slot. At the time of it's 
>creation the rule book was sufficient to manipulate all symbols that existed.
>So, everybody was in awe of this "intelligent" room! Now, I come along
>and present it with a question concerning "COMPUTERS" or "SPACE SHUTTLES".
>Now, to anyone who claims that the room could even begin to manipulate the
>symbols "COMPUTER" or "SPACE SHUTTLE" I can only say 'piff'!! And furthermore
>it could never manipulate these symbols because no-body can get in to change
>the rule book!!!

In this case it is not a true Chinese Room.  See my other posting on this
- in summary, Searle assumes that the C.R. is an implementation of a
program that will pass the Turing Test; the T.T. is, essentially,
indistinguishability from a human.  Since a human mature 190 years
ago who has not aged since, and who has kept up conversations with
others since, could discuss computers and shuttles, the Chinese Room
could also.  If you have problems with this, you have some
misunderstanding of the Chinese Room or the Turing Test, or you
simply do not believe that any program could pass the Turing Test.

(The other interpretation is that, in 190 years, the Chinese Room
has only had time for half an hour's conversation, and thus
considers itself firmly embedded in 1800.  However, I don't think
that's what you meant.  :-)

>
>Incidently, I am pro AI and I feel that while Searle's Chinese room addresses
>a certain aspect of comtemporary views in AI it does not contradict the 
>possibility of AI! I would like to see some discussion on other aspects in the
>AI line and an end to this flogging of a quite wounded horse!
>

OK, start another line of discussion.  Unfortunately, comp.ai.
philosophy was, as far as I can tell, created with the main
purpose of getting the Chinese Room off comp.ai.  If you can
start another good philosophical debate on AI, great!  I can
only type so many things on this one (expressions of disbelief
from regular readers assumed :-)

DHT