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From: newsuser@LTH.Se (LTH network news server)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: A philosopher's view of the Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1989Mar8.153202.4302@LTH.Se>
Date: 8 Mar 89 14:32:01 GMT
Reply-To: janeric@Control.LTH.Se (Jan Eric Larsson)
Organization: Dept. of Automatic Control, Lund Inst. of Technology, Sweden
Lines: 28

Mr. Steven Harnad, Princeton, has vigorously denied being a philosopher.
It is really a pity that there are so few philosophers on the net :-)
Now over to the room:

1. The example is very unrealistic in the first place. Before Searle would
   be able to produced good translations/answers, he would surely have
   learnt a lot of chinese. Let us forget this for the sake of argument.

2. One way of defining understanding is to say that anything acting in
   a certain way (answering questions in chinese) understands. In this
   sense, the Searle + room system has understanding. (Turing would have
   liked this sense, I think.)

3. Subjective understanding roughly means that a mind (introspectively)
   knows itself to have understanding. It is only this particular mind
   that can know itself to have understanding in this sense.

Thus, Harnad's argument (that there is no subjective understanding by
the Searle + room system) is simply wrong. The truth is that we don't
know. There might be understanding minds all over the place, but as long
as we can't observe any signs of them, we just don't know. So this attack
on the "symbol crunching" fails.

-- 
Jan Eric Larsson                      JanEric@Control.LTH.Se      +46 46 108795
Department of Automatic Control
Lund Institute of Technology         "We watched the thermocouples dance to the
Box 118, S-221 00 LUND, Sweden        spirited tunes of a high frequency band."