Xref: utzoo talk.philosophy.misc:3645 comp.ai:6077 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!qw0w+ From: qw0w+@andrew.cmu.edu (Quanfeng Wu) Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai Subject: Re: Why the Chinese Room doesn't convince Message-ID: Date: 25 Feb 90 01:07:54 GMT References: <12015@venera.isi.edu>, <6595@cps3xx.UUCP> Organization: Psychology, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA Lines: 27 In-Reply-To: <6595@cps3xx.UUCP> >where is the compelling support for sub-symbolic storage and retrieval >in stephen's example? >again, i emphasize that i share the intuition that some combination of >symbol level processing and sub-symbol level processing is going >to be necessary. i just don't that stephen's example is helping to force >us in that direction. I also have that intuition; but my problem is: can all sub-symbolic information storage and processing be simulated in a symbolic fashion? This may serve an illustration for my question: when I (or someone else) hit my knee, my leg would have a reflexive kick; in this case, I don't think my hand has given any symbolic information to my leg, neither would I think my leg has processed any symbolic information to give out that reflexive behavior. That would be an example of sub-symbolic processing; and it may be easily simulated in a connectionist model. But one the other hand, I also don't think it would be very difficult to implement that kind of reflexive behaviors in a symbolic way, say, using a micro-processor attached to an artificial leg. Is there any evidence that some sub-symbolic computation as simulated in connectionist models are *not computatable* in symbolic computation? Of course, I think there are examples of *more computationally efficient* in syb-symbolic than in symbolic! -Quanfeng Wu