Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Summary: Split Brain, Split Personality, Split Intuitions Message-ID: Date: 6 Mar 89 05:44:39 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <7431@polya.Stanford.EDU> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 40 geddis@polya.Stanford.EDU (Donald F. Geddis) of Stanford University wrote: " the whole entity (Searle + memorized rules) *does* understand Chinese, " although a section of it (Searle by himself) doesn't... Now there are " *two* minds in Searle's brain... I don't consider the lone Searle to be an " authority on what Searle + Memorized Rules understands, although you " seem to. Why? [And] [a]s a matter of fact, I do [believe that I could " fail to understand, and alpha centauri could fail to understand, " but "I + alpha centauri" could compositely understand] In view of what you are prepared to believe about intergalactically distributed intelligence I am sure you will not be impressed to hear that to this lone terrestrial neuropsychologist it seems highly unlikely that memorizing a set of rules could give rise to two minds in the same brain: As far as I know, only Joe Bogen's knife has had such dramatic effects (in the "split-brain" patients -- and possibly also early traumatic child abuse in patients suffering from multiple personality syndome). " The point of the [Linguistic] Turing Test [LTT] was to eliminate " non-cognitive things [e.g., bias from appearance] from the test... " We only want to judge cognitive ability. Whether this requires TTT " ability is a problem for the engineers, not the judges. I agree. But, as I argue in my paper, the LTT -- symbols-in, symbols-out -- is systematically ambiguous about what goes on in between input and output. It is only a CONJECTURE that symbol-crunching alone would be enough. There are several reasons for concluding that that conjecture is wrong, and Searle's Argument happens to be one of them. Ref: Harnad (1989) Minds, Machines and Searle. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 1: 5 - 25. -- Stevan Harnad INTERNET: harnad@confidence.princeton.edu harnad@princeton.edu srh@flash.bellcore.com harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu harnad@princeton.uucp BITNET: harnad@pucc.bitnet CSNET: harnad%princeton.edu@relay.cs.net (609)-921-7771