Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!nic.MR.NET!umn-d-ub!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!att!ihlpb!arm From: arm@ihlpb.ATT.COM (Macalalad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Keywords: Understanding, Comprehension, Learning Message-ID: <9787@ihlpb.ATT.COM> Date: 6 Mar 89 16:33:44 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <9770@ihlpb.ATT.COM> Reply-To: arm@ihlpb.UUCP (55528-Macalalad,A.R.) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois Lines: 28 In article harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes: >"The human," in case you've forgotten, is the only one in there, besides >the chalk and blackboards! I'll let you be the judge of how good a judge >the chalk, or Searle-plus-chalk makes... > >Look, do you think an inert book of rules is capable of understanding? >If you do, then you'll have no trouble believing that stones, chalk, >constellations and tea-leaves are capable of understanding too, and I >certainly won't be able to prove you wrong. (Animism or panpsychism -- >the belief that anything and everything can have a mind -- is the other >side of the other-minds problem.) But if we assume that we need a bit >more than that -- say, the ability to pass the LTT [sic] -- then >Searle's Argument is there to show us that that's just not good enough, >because he can pass the LTT for Chinese without understanding Chinese. >And he's all there is to the "system." It is interesting that the only point you didn't comment on was the argument that neurons seem to be the "chalk-pushers" of the brain, yet they individually don't seem to have understanding. Let's make the analogy a little more explicit. Instead of having just one person in the Chinese room, let's have a lot of people, comparable to the number of neurons in the brain. All of them are busy doing calculations on the chalkboard and passing pieces of paper around, all in strict adherence to their rulebooks. And the output, of course, is fluent Chinese. Is it so clear now which one in the Chinese room should understand Chinese? -Alex