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From: gilham@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Fred Gilham)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: What the Chinese Room is
Message-ID: <1990Feb5.193530.13545@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 5 Feb 90 19:35:30 GMT
References: <2602@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> <1990Jan9.162338.28110@twwells.com> <9458@cbmvax.commodore.com> <21866@unix.cis.pitt.edu> <1990Jan27.004920.28355@agate.berkeley.edu> <466@althea.UUCP> <3488@accuvax.nwu.edu>
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Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
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In article <3488@accuvax.nwu.edu> cliff@delta.eecs.nwu.edu (Cliff Chaput) writes:
>
>Ah!  But according to Searle's statement of the criteria, the rules of the
>book are designed to be *indistinguishable* from a native Chinese speaker!
>This means that every response you would expect from a Chinese person you
>could get from this book.  That's some book, if you ask me.
>
>So if you're looking for intelligence in the Chinese room, I'd examine the
>book.  Given the current definition of the problem, they guy in the room
>doesn't know chinese, the symbols don't know chinese, but the BOOK DOES!
>Otherwise, how else could it be indistinguishable from a native Chinese
>speaker?  This explains the anomalous "memorizing the book" problem: if the
>book knows Chinese, then a man memorizing a book does nothing more than
>change the medium.  The information remains the same.
>
>I realize I'm not being that clear, be let me give an analogous example
>(god save me!).  There's a program out there called Mathematica, which does
>an awful lot of mathematics from top to bottom (Integrations, Equation
>solving, all sorts of neat stuff).  The program includes most of the known
>rules of mathematics.  Is it safe to say that this program "knows"
>mathematics?  I would think so.  I can't expect any other person who knows
>mathematics to do much more that Mathematica.  Now, this is not saying that
>people won't do more; some are better at math insights, some are better at
>passing math tests, some are better at showing their work.  But I would
>claim that these are not central to the knowledge of mathematics proper.
>Even if we want to reduce it some and ask, "Does Mathematica know algebra?"
>one would surely be forced to answer positively.
>

No!  Mathematica does not know algebra or mathematics.  To see why
this is so, we just have to look at the human analogy of Mathematica,
namely "cookbook" math. Mathematica is a sophisticated system for
doing cookbook math.  Many people can do calculus from the integral
tables without really knowing calculus.  I remember taking a class
where I was taught just that.

Someone who knows calculus can go outside the cookbook.  Such a person
can apply his knowledge to problems that are not covered by any of the
rules he already knows.  Besides this, such a person can see
applications for the rules that are not immediately obvious.

To use a simpler example, take long division.  Most of us know the
standard algorithm for long division.  I taught it to kids in
elementary school.  But I could tell that some of these kids were
following the rules without knowing why they worked, or really, what
the use of it all was.  Yet they could do the algorithm reliably.  I
would say that they did not know division, even though they could
execute the steps of the algorithm so as to produce the result.  If
I had asked them to think of some other algorithm for doing long
division, they would have looked at me as if I were crazy.  They
probably would have thought "This IS long division."

The "book", then, contains the steps of the algorithm.  It is at least
two steps removed from knowledge, in that something needs to execute
the algorithm and some mind needs to interpret the results..  The
whole trick behind the Chinese Room argument is that it is possible to
handle symbols in two ways, mechanically and semantically.  The
Chinese Room argument claims that a mind can assign meaning to symbols
that are produced by an entity to which the symbols have no meaning.
Making the entity very complicated does not change this.

-Fred Gilham   gilham@csl.sri.com