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From: kck@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Reply to Harnad re:Chinese Room
Message-ID: <4317@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 89 07:28:23 GMT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 60

> From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad)
> Searle's argument is simple but deep. Its simplicity has
> led a lot of people who have not understood the deeper point it is
> making into irrelevancies of their own creation. To show it to be
> incorrect you must first understand it.

What deeper point? It appears to be nothing but a form of vitalism -- brains
have these mysterious "causal powers" without which understanding is not
possible. It looks to me like the normal sort of confusion one might expect
from someone not used to layered sytems in which each layer interprets/runs
the layer above it. 

Further, Searle engages in gratuitous non-sequitors when he says things like
"For example, my stomach has a level of description where it does
information processing, and it instantiates any number of computer programs
(true -- ed.), but I take it we do not want to say that it has any
understanding (also true -- ed.). Yet if we accept the systems reply, it is
hard to see how we avoid saying that stomach, heart, liver, etc. are all
understanding subsystems, since there is no principled way to distinguish
the motivation for saying the Chinese subsystem understands from saying that
the stomach understands (yes there is -- we have posited that the I/O
behavior of the Chinese system passes the Turing Test, we have never posited
that wrt the information processing description of the stomach -- ed.)." 
There's something "deep" here, all right, but it's not the philosophy.

> Understanding is what is "+" of Searle (and you) with respect to
> English, and "-" with respect to Searle (and you, and the computer
> running the program he's executing) with respect to Chinese. 

No one cares what Searle does or doesn't understand when he is simulating a
physical symbol system capable of passing a written Turing Test in Chinese.
Period. If what Searle calls Strong AI is true I still wouldn't expect
Searle to understand Chinese in the Chinese room. 
                                If

Searle-doesn't-understand-Chinese-in-the-Chinese-Room --> ~(Strong AI),

                      then it must be true that 

(Strong AI) --> ~(Searle-doesn't-understand-Chinese-in-the-Chinese-Room). 

Unfortunately, that isn't true. Therefore, Searle not understanding Chinese
in the Chinese Room is not sufficient to disprove Strong AI. I may be an
ideologically blinded AI fanatic (death to the heretical unbelievers!), but
I'm still capable of applying the law of the contrapositive.

> [This is the negative note on which Searle's Argument ended in 1980;
> not to leave it at that, let me add that in "Minds, Machines and
> Searle" (1989) I've tried to take it further in a positive direction,
> showing that it's only the symbolic approach to modeling the mind
> that's vulnerable to Searle's Argument; nonsymbolic and hybrid
> symbolic/nonsymbolic models are not. 

Does Searle agree with you? It would certainly seem that he anticipates
this sort of argument in the paper reprinted in "Mind Design" when he
discusses "The Brain Simulator Reply". You have to have those mysterious
"causal powers" that neurons have. 

Karl Kluge (kck@g.cs.cmu.edu)

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