Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!noao!arizona!mike
From: mike@arizona.edu (Mike Coffin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Chinese Room argument
Message-ID: <9557@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 4 Mar 89 06:40:18 GMT
References: <2121@star.cs.vu.nl>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 33

From article <2121@star.cs.vu.nl>, by roelw@cs.vu.nl:

> How then could a universal TM (i.e. a computer) fed with a program
> which can answer questions in Chinese ever come to "know" the
> denotation of the symbols it is manipulating? The outcome of its
> computation is invariant under changes of denotation of the symbols
> it manipulates; the people programming the UTM may change the
> denotation of symbol xyz from chair to table or to anything else,
> without it making the slightest difference to the computation.

What makes you think that a program sophisticated enough to answer
questions in Chinese is going to represent a chair or a table as a
single symbol?  The concept of a "chair" could be a very complicated,
interconnected mesh of symbols, some of which might contribute to, and
be shared by, many other objects and concepts.  No single symbol
would "means" anything, except in its relationship to 10^9 or so other
symbols.

I'm beginning to think that the real trick in Searle's thought
experiment is to get us to provisionally accept the fact that a human
is a fast enough computer to have any hope of simulating another
person.  This immediately leads to a mental image of an algorithm
about as complicated as a recipe from a French cookbook, or maybe a
set of instructions from Heathkit.  Once he has installed this mental
image of a "symbolic program", Searle then appeals to your intuition
--- how could such a thing understand?  When you break this mind-set,
and start thinking about a parallel processor with 10^12 independent
processors, madly calculating and communicating in extremely
complicated patterns, it is not so clear what it could or couldn't do.
-- 
Mike Coffin				mike@arizona.edu
Univ. of Ariz. Dept. of Comp. Sci.	{allegra,cmcl2}!arizona!mike
Tucson, AZ  85721			(602)621-2858