Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aipna!rjc From: rjc@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <563@aipna.ed.ac.uk> Date: 20 Feb 89 20:52:59 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <51123@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Reply-To: rjc@uk.ac.ed.aipna (Richard Caley) Organization: Dept. of AI, Edinburgh, UK Lines: 72 Dragon: Mnemouth In article harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes: >But we can certainly still POINT to understanding , when it's there; >and say it isn't there, when it isn't. I certainly can't, and it seems to be an assumption of the chinese room that I can't. My understanding is that the bahviour of the searle+room+rules system is to be indistiguiahsble from a native chinese speaker and it is only by opening the room and seeing searle and asking _him_ if he understands that we are supposed to determine that the system does not "understand" chinese. If I _can_ tell understanding systems from non-understanding ones then the whole argument is pointless, since I can never be "fooled" by the room. Understanding is a subjective phenomenon; _I_ know if I understand chinese ( no ) but you only have my word for it. So it _is_ a definitional problem. Since we have assumed that the behaviour is identical whether or not it understands, we must rely on deduction based on the structure of the system to tell us if it understands. Most significantly, we can't rely on the method we use for humans - if we ask the room ( presumably in chinese ), it says yes, otherwise the behaviour is not like that of a native speaker! Without defining understanding we can't argue with it since our intuative knowledge of understanding is only for _ourselves_, we apply it to other people since they seem rater similar, we can _try_ and apply it to philosophers in rooms or computer systems but I would not trust the result - " Hm, it does not have a chinese passport and so ... " >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. Aren't you assuming the result here. If searle running the program is "-" WRT "understanding" the naturally the system does not understand. This is tautological! >Lacking >any other evidence for "+" on the computer's behalf, that makes the score >on understanding: Searle 1, computer 0. If you are trying to prove non-understanding by a default assumption then I would say you prove nothing, since I can just as easily assert that by default we must assume that the system _does_ understand. This is certainly the default I apply to people ( "if they seem to understand chinese then they do - ask them what the menu means" ). Why should it be different for other types of system? >[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; If the argument could be truncated to a reasonable length, then I would be interested if you posed it. I don't see why, say, searle in a room pulling strings and waving springs ( or doing something else equally non-symbolic ) which happens to produce behaviour like a chinese speaker would not be the basis for a precicely parallel argument. I'm not saying you are wrong, just that it is not obvious. -- rjc@uk.ac.ed.aipna " Only love denies the second law of thermodynamics " - Jerry Cornelius