Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!xerox From: xerox@cs.vu.nl (J. A. Durieux) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Chinese Room by Shannon and McCarthy from 1956 Message-ID: <5319@star.cs.vu.nl> Date: 7 Feb 90 09:57:56 GMT References: <2891@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <2903@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <10599@june.cs.washington.edu> <14266@cs.yale.edu> Sender: news@cs.vu.nl Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam Lines: 31 In article , hwajin@ganges.wrs.com (Hwa Jin Bae) writes: >Hofstadter and Dennett have shattered the Chinese Room on every point >long ago. Go look them up on your bookshelves. Strange. Whenever I reread their stuff I get more convinced that they haven't understood what Searle is talking about at all. Possibly because they are so "immersed" in their position that operationality is all there is to being. Searle doesn't seem to be a good defender of his own cause, I think one has to have thought about his points of view before in order to have them "resonate", and to understand them. (I don't feel able to state them better, by the way.) I think the class of people that doesn't think there is a fundamental difference between "thinking" and "understanding" is not going to feel that resonance. My opinion is, that behaviour has simply a too small bandwidth to be able to distinguish understanding and not-understanding systems *in principle*. Compare the "reduced Turing test": an observer puts his hand into either of two holes, and gets hit by a stone when he does so. If the observer is unable to find out behind which hole is the human with a stone, and behind which a robot with a stone ... [I think this comes from Hofstadter, by the way] If I (coolly and rationally) decide to play being angry, and do so convincingly. is "my whole system" in some sense angry? Biep.