Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <220@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 28 Feb 89 19:37:48 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 31 In article harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes: >kck@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge) of Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI >wrote: >" Ah, but it is a word game... We have Mind A, which we will call John >" Searle, which understands English, and which in its capacity as a >" Universal Turing Machine is emulating Mind B, which we will call Fu >" Bar. Mind A, John Searle, does not understand what is going on in Mind >" B, Fu Bar, whose execution it is simulating. >Ah me. Is it really so difficult to see that in the above you have >simply presupposed the conclusion you were trying to demonstrate? >Before we buy into any dogmas, it is a fact that Searle has a mind, but >definitely NOT a fact that "Fu Bar" has a mind. OK. But Searle is claiming that his lack of understanding shows that Fu Bar (about which both we and Searle know little) does not understand. But that does not follow from Searle's lack of under- standing. For all Searle knows, Fu Bar might understand. I suspect Searle would say that using his brain as a computer (running the program encoded in the instructuions he follows) isn't using his brain in the right way, btu can he prove it? It may have been a mstake to talk about Mind A and Mind B, but I think you are dismissing this point unfairly. That Fu Bar has a mind has not been shown, but neither has it been shown that Fu Bar does not have a mind. So, if nothing is shown, then Searle, who claims to have shown somehting, loses. -- Jeff