Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Summary: Keep It Simple... Message-ID: Date: 7 Mar 89 04:23:56 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <387@censor.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 35 jeff@censor.UUCP (Jeff Hunter) of Bell Canada, Business Development, Toronto wrote: " An assumption of the Chinese room argument is that a set of rules that " manipulate symbols can be built that passes the (Linguistic) Turing " Test in Chinese.... I make the further assumption that modelling a " human on an atom-by-atom level would be sufficient to reproduce that " human's verbal behaviour... This is followed by a long list of arbitrary variations and permutations on Searle's simple Chinese Room -- including real people, atomic copies, synthetic copies and neural networks, as well as symbolic and human "simulations" of all the foregoing, in unspecified languages -- none of which seem to elucidate anything. I am asked which ones can understand English. The simple answer is that those that can pass the TTT (including the English LTT) can. Atomic and synthetic robotic copies could do that in principle (so what?); mere symbol-crunchers (including symbolic simulations of atomic copies, neural nets, etc.) cannot, for a number of reasons, among them Searle's Chinese Room Argument. Burying Searle's simple, straightforward point in a labyrinth of arbitrary complications serves neither to understand it nor to refute it. Refs: Searle, J. (1980) Minds, Brains and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417-457 Harnad, S. (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