Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!roelw@cs.vu.nl From: roelw@cs.vu.nl Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Chinese room argument Message-ID: <2140@star.cs.vu.nl> Date: 9 Mar 89 13:52:54 GMT Sender: roelw@cs.vu.nl Reply-To: roelw@cs.vu.nl () Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam Lines: 24 In <8903061329.aa02322@hansw.cs.vu.nl>, Weigand Hans writes > The intuitive meaning of "meaning" is much closer related to connotation > than to denotation (witness our ability to talk meaningfull about > non-existent things). I agree, but my argument (thinking cannot be symbol-manipulation because a symbol-manipulation process is independent of the denotation of the symbols used) works if being able to know the connotaation of a symbol implies being able to know the denotation of the symbol. > Can you explain what you mean by saying that "the rules for manipulating > those symbols are independent from D"? Evidently, these rules have been > designed by scientists knowing Chinese. So in an obvious sense, they highly > depend on D. Since these rules stem from humans, who attribute to them > a certain meaning, the rules are not meaningless. The meaning is > carried over to the symbols they manipulate. The last sentence seems to be a modern brand of mystics. The process by which people found the grammar rules of Chinese is completely different from the process by which a symbol-manipulating machine manipulates symbols using this grammar. Roel Wieringa