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From: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Chinese Room argument
Summary: I hear and I forget.  I see and I remember.  I sit and I understand.
Keywords: Chair and /char/ alike.
Message-ID: <46017@linus.UUCP>
Date: 7 Mar 89 23:52:00 GMT
References: <2125@star.cs.vu.nl>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry Kort)
Organization: The TaoLight Zone, Ste. Elsewhen
Lines: 36

Karl Kluge, who is evidently a silicon-based symbol cruncher, writes:

 > My production of a piece of text is not affected by your changing the
 > denotation of the symbols occuring in it.  However, this does *not*
 > imply that I process the text in the same way as a computer processes it.
 > How did *you* ever come to "know" the denotations of  words/symbols
 > in your mind?

To which Roel Wieringa responds:

 > I don't know; we should turn to empirical research on developmental
 > psychology to get some answers.

Consider a child who hears an adult utter the phonetic sequence,
/char/, while pointing to this object:

	|
	|
	|___
	|   |
	|   |

Years later, the child hears her teacher utter /char/ while scribbling
this cryptic rune on the blackboard:

	CHAIR

It seems to me that the child "understands" when she makes the
connection between the tangible, visible object upon which she
is sitting, the utterance, /char/, and the scribble "CHAIR".

The problem with the LTT, is that only one symbol reposes in the
artificial mind, instead of the three inter-related representations
of the same real-world object.

--Barry Kort