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From: msellers@mentor.com (Mike Sellers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: The Chinese Room and the Babylonian Bureaucracy
Message-ID: <1990Jan9.060511.9121@mentor.com>
Date: 9 Jan 90 06:05:11 GMT
Organization: engr
Lines: 73

The following occurred to me while reading Searle's article in Sci Am.
Comments appreciated.

  Assumption: humans do (at times) understand, think, and consciously 
apprehend, whatever those words specifically mean; they have enough 
common-sense content to let them stand on their own for now.  The issue 
at hand then seems to be whether computers in some possible configuration
can reproduce this same process or effect, especially within some practical 
bounds of space and time.  (I suppose the reason for asking this question 
is, first of all, simply that we are continually fascinated by our own 
magnificance.  Secondly, if we can determine the answer to this question, 
we may be better able to focus our efforts in trying to create other 
intelligences like ourselves --the hard way, I mean. :-) )

  If syntax can yield semantics, then it may be that the person in the 
Chinese Room will, in fact, gain an understanding of the messages being 
passed in and out after some manipulation:  He will have learned the 
meaning of the input from the process he goes through to create the output.
If this is the case, then the whole argument will have succeeded in showing 
that a sufficiently complex symbol processor can attain understanding.  
Or at least that a sufficiently complex symbol processor can appear to
have attained understanding, which in reality may be the same (how do I 
know when my daughter has understood me?  How about my dog?  Or you?).  

  However, if syntax cannot yield semantics, then it would seem that the 
person within the Room is destined to simply be a non-conscious symbol 
pusher forever.  In this case, let us suppose that the occupant is further 
reduced to receiving the simplest of symbols and putting other simple ones 
out after following some rules laid out in a rather thin rule-book.  From
time to time the rule-book calls for a null response, and from time to 
time it calls for the transcriptionist to add a new page to the book
containing new instructions constructed from an explanation in the book 
itself.  Usually though, he simply creates a new message based on a 
manipulation of the old according to the book.   
  In addition, our symbol pusher is not dealing with anything so intricate 
as Chinese, but is instead getting and producing a limited form of 
Babylonian cuneiform.  Unknown to our Babylonian transcriptionist, 
there also exist some number of other Babylonian Booths, each receiving 
and transmitting their own limited messages in a rather undirected fashion.
Together these comprise a Bablylonian Bureaucracy where each Booth receives 
some simple input, processes it a bit, and supplies some output to some 
other Booth.  Each Booth receives symbols from some number of others, and 
supplies input to still others, though the inhabitant of each need not be 
aware of this fact.  
  This whole improbable set up may seem to be begging the question of the 
original Chinese Room symbol manipulation scenario (though set up in the 
large), but it contains an important difference:  Each Booth is blind to 
the functioning of the others, and knows only about its own activity.  
Individually they are rather primitive, if flexible, cuneiform processors,
and possess none of the attributes we are interested in.  However, taken 
together, we must conclude that (through some process we do not as yet 
understand (!)) the whole mass of them together will eventually --given 
the necessary and sufficient environmental input-- take on awareness, 
understanding, and cognizance.  This must be the case, since the only 
existing example of a thing possessing these qualities aquires and 
maintains them by just such a system.  
  We each possess some number of relatively simple, though highly 
communicative processors that, we assume, do not themselves possess any 
of "our" faculties.  The Babylonian Bureaucracy does not begin to explain
how such a system can generate consciousness, and yet such generation does
apparently occur.  It does however extend the possibility that by starting
with an appropriate mass of processors --natural OR artificial--  arrayed 
in some as yet undetermined but highly connected fashion, and supplied 
with continual and coherent environmental input, we will eventually end 
up with something that could in fact "be" a dog, a child, or a computer.

Again, comments would be appreciated.

-- 
Mike Sellers                ...!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!msellers
Mentor Graphics Corp.                  msellers@mntgfx.MENTOR.COM
Electronic Packaging and Analysis Division -- AutoSurface Project
            "Amor est magis cognitivus quam cognitio"