Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!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: <9573@megaron.arizona.edu> Date: 6 Mar 89 00:06:33 GMT References: Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson Lines: 21 From article (Stevan Harnad): > (3) Forget about speed and complexity: That's just hand-waving. Oh, I agree it is just handwaving. But as I now (with your help) understand Searle's argument, on the very bottom line there is an appeal to intuition. That intuition is that "there isn't anyone home" --- that the only entity in the Chinese room capable of understanding is Searle himself. That intuition is powerful, as long as you're thinking in terms of relatively simple tasks: baking a cake or doing tensor calculus. THIS is what putting a human in the box does: it tends to make you think of a relatively simple task that your intuition might apply to. But simulating a Chinese speaker is not a task for which our intuition provides any guidance. It is as far outside everyday experience as quantum mechanics --- another field where intuition is useless and deceptive. -- Mike Coffin mike@arizona.edu Univ. of Ariz. Dept. of Comp. Sci. {allegra,cmcl2}!arizona!mike Tucson, AZ 85721 (602)621-2858