Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!mcnc!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!harnad From: harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu (Stevan Harnad) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument Summary: The wrong road to the mind... Message-ID: Date: 11 Mar 89 05:17:26 GMT References: <2233@tank.uchicago.edu> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 35 staff_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu (R.Kohout) of University of Chicago Graduate School of Business asks: " What can possibly be gained from this debate over Searle's thought " experiment? Assuming that we could come to some sort of universal " agreement about this (and I really don't think that is possible) will " it make a single iota of difference to the work we're doing? The historian J. H. Hexter once wrote: in an academic generation a little overaddicted to "politesse," it may be worth saying that violent destruction is not necessarily worthless and futile. Even though it leaves doubt about the right road for London, it helps if someone rips up, however violently, a `To London' sign on the Dover cliffs pointing south... Searle's Argument has helped to show that pure symbol-crunching is not the right road to the mind. In my JETAI paper I gave more reasons, and in my book I try to show another road, a bottom-up one, in which symbolic representations are grounded nonmodularly in nonsymbolic representations. Refs: Searle, J. (1980) Minds, Brains and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417-457 Harnad, S. (1989) Minds, Machines and Searle. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 1: 5 - 25. Harnad, S. (1987) Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition. Cambridge University Press. -- Stevan Harnad INTERNET: harnad@confidence.princeton.edu harnad@princeton.edu srh@flash.bellcore.com harnad@elbereth.rutgers.edu harnad@princeton.uucp BITNET: harnad@pucc.bitnet CSNET: harnad%princeton.edu@relay.cs.net (609)-921-7771