Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert From: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Message-ID: <2568@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Date: 10 Mar 89 15:32:11 GMT References: <9560@megaron.arizona.edu> Reply-To: gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) Organization: Comp Sci, Glasgow Univ, Scotland Lines: 26 In article <9560@megaron.arizona.edu> mike@arizona.edu (Mike Coffin) writes: > You do this in spite of all the >evidence of your senses --- remember, this system passes the Turing >test! You have this impressive system in front of you; it >certainly seems to understand Chinese; Searle certainly doesn't; the >rules by themselves certainly don't. Yet you ignore the evidence and >insist on talking about components of the system as if they were the >system. It almost looks like you're in the grips of an ideology :-) The system passes the LTT (because Searle so defines the gedanken experiment), but it DOES NOT understand - certainly not in the sense of the way people use the word. So, what is AI? An attempt to build artefacts, or an attempt to brain wash us into seeing 5 when 4 fingers are held up? Stop messing with my language - 200 years of melting pot have wrecked it enough already :-( Everyone is in the grip of some ideology, but the systems' one is just plain silly if it attributes "understanding" to a system. I am a holist, but I don't see how an attribute of a part can be transferred to the whole if it doesn't exist in the part. The interesting thing about systems is the attributes of the whole which CANNOT be attributes of the parts, not true here I'm afraid. -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert