Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!dan-hankins From: dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <15469@cup.portal.com> Date: 7 Mar 89 00:12:55 GMT References: <4298@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <7431@polya.Stanford.EDU> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 45 In article harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) writes: >In view of what you are prepared to believe about intergalactically >distributed intelligence... I see distributed intelligences every day. The most common form is called a committee. Another is called a bureaucracy. >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). I must call attention to a widespread phenomenon among writers of fiction. Many authors report that the characters they invent seem to take on 'a life of their own', and that the author does not in fact know exactly what the characters are going to do or say next. However, what the author does know about the characters is their history and much of their personalities. In some sense, this knowledge comprises a program for that character, and the author's knowledge about how the world works and how people interact provides an interpreter for that character program. Some authors have even said that they do not understand why their characters do what they do, which seems to me remarkably close to what Searle is saying when he says that he does not understand Chinese. In the sense that the author can run that character's program, the author can in fact become that character. Another illustration of this is fantasy role playing games, in which the participants can be observed to exhibit (at least verbal) behavior which is *not their own*, but that of the character they have created. Again, each participant has in mind a set of rules or a program for that character's behavior, and executes that program (i.e. manipulates the symbols) during the course of play. So the claim that a person executing a set of rules is then another person is not as ridiculous as it seems on the face of things. Dan Hankins