Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!markh
From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Is the Chinese Room Experiment Consistent?
Message-ID: <1798@uwm.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 90 00:40:59 GMT
Sender: news@uwm.edu
Reply-To: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Lines: 43


     I have been left behind on this issue without having my substantial
question answered?  What makes anyone think that it is even possible to
formulate a complete set of language rules that do not also take into account
our mobility and musculature, our sensory systems (since a large part of our
vocabulary directly relates to it) -- that is: the human being as a control
system?
     
     If you conduct the Chinese Room Experiment -- incorporating a TRULY
complete set of rules for Chinese -- you're going to end up proving the
Chinese Room Argument wrong.  The understanding process, whereby our actual
life-processes are linked to our internal symbols, is an integral part of a
language's semantics and (especially) pragmatics -- because we are first and
foremost intelligent control systems that process sensors and actuators.
Somewhere in your semantic description the elemantary symbols underlying
language have to be linked to the control routines we use in our everyday
living.  How are you going to teach a system a languages' semantics if it
can't at least simulate these processes?

     The machine will probably even participate in a future Tiennamen Square
conflict and stop a tank dead in its tracks after having learned Chinese. :)

     A simple example to make this more concrete: you can't teach a
congenitally blind person the meaning of the word "green", because our
understanding of the word derives at least in part from the very algorithm
we use to actually perceive the color (a good part of which is implemented in
the hardware that goes to make our retina).  Or, more simply ... the meaning IS
the algorithm, abstracted as a data item.

     There's Syntax and Semantics.  Have people forgotten about Pragmatics,
after all?

     The meaning of locatives, such as "at", directly relate to the actual set
of rules we use in guiding our motion and our manipulation of objects.  You
can't understand those words as we do without already having an implemented plan
generating system to control a mobile unit's actions in its environment (or
at least a simulation of this).

     That's gonna be an awfully huge Chinese Room.

     So the question is, why do we even accept the premise of the Chinese Room
Experiment when it is, in my mind, obviously contradictory? (that a language
can be "described" independent of the way it is "understood" and "used".)