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From: pbiron@weber.ucsd.edu (Paul Biron)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese room and stuff
Message-ID: <4066@network.ucsd.edu>
Date: 23 Nov 90 18:33:37 GMT
References: <12160.274a7a65@ccvax.ucd.ie>
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In article <12160.274a7a65@ccvax.ucd.ie> tskelly@ccvax.ucd.ie writes:
>
>with symbols on it and etc. etc. The important point is that the entity
>inside the room examines the symbols on the input paper only to apply rules
>to them to get a string of symbols for passing back out!
>Now, in comes a piece of paper with the symbols
>		"WHAT IS 2 + 2?"
>After matching up the symbols and the rule book the entity should arrive
>at the symbol "4" which it passes back out!
>The entity has arrived at this symbol in answer to the input
>purely by symbol manipultaion - in other words the rule book will say
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>something to the effect of " when the symbols '2' and '2' are seperated
>by a '+' etc.  then the resulting symbol is '4' ". 
>
>Stephen Kelly
>TSKELLY@CCVAX.UCD.IE

The important point is that "the entity inside the room" must do some
processing on its input in order to "examine the symbols".  The symbols
are not just given.  IOW, Searle (and those who find his arguments
convincing) assume that "examining the symbols" is NOT part of
'understanding' (whatever that means :-)  But it is one of the most
important parts!

Even if it were the case that once we have "examined the symbols", we
do "pure symbol manipulation" (which I seriously doubt), that alone
would not show that the "room" did not understand, since it doesn't
account for the act of "examining".  If the sole point of Searle's
argument is that 'understanding', 'cognition', etc.  are NOT
"symbol manipulation" we didn't need Searle to tell us that
(Newell & Simon not withstanding)!

A few postings ago, someone mentioned Harnad's "Other Minds" paper,
I'd also suggest that anyone interested in this topic read Harnad's
"Minds, Machines and Searle", _Journal of Experimental and Theoretical
Artifical Intelligence_, Vol 1, No 1, 1989.  Both this and the "Other
Minds" paper are available (in troff format) via anon ftp from
princeton.edu, in the directory /pub/harnad.
Paul Biron      pbiron@ucsd.edu        (619) 534-5758
Central University Library, Mail Code C-075-R
Social Sciences DataBase Project
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, Ca. 92093