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Path: utzoo!dciem!mmt
From: mmt@dciem.dciem.dnd.ca (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai
Subject: Re: Why the Chinese Room doesn't convince
Message-ID: <2952@dciem.dciem.dnd.ca>
Date: 1 Mar 90 01:10:07 GMT
References: <12015@venera.isi.edu> <6595@cps3xx.UUCP>
Reply-To: mmt@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca (Martin Taylor)
Followup-To: talk.philosophy.misc
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 59


Jon Sticklen comments on Stephen Smoliar's example of the Kronos Quartet's
playing music from Psycho:

From article <12015@venera.isi.edu>, by smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar):
...


i have a similar intuition as stephen that symbol level processing 
is not everything. but i find his arguments not compelling me toward 
that conclusion. the gist of stephen's argument is that his narative
paragraph about PSYCHO and string quartets is not what communicates 
his expereince to me, but rather that his narative puts me in a "mental
state" that is similar to his, and that in fact the information was
somehow in me all the time. 

no problem. another, maybe more obvious example, is of couples that have
been together for many years and that have to utter only the slighest
phoneme for the other to seemingly totally understand some subtle
communication. the content of the communication is pretty clearly mostly
in the receiver, and the provocation by the sender is just a trigger.

but that observation does not seem to support sub-symbolic representation
and computation. it would seem equally plausible that the hearer (or
reader of stephen's paragraph) had that information stored somehow 
symbolically, and once triggered it popped up.

where is the compelling support for sub-symbolic storage and retrieval
in stephen's example?

=====================================
I would not say that anything in either example has any relevance to
sub-symbolic storage and retrieval.  Both seem to be clear examples of
what would be called high-level messages in Layered Protocol theory(1)
The objective of any communication is exactly what the end of each of
the first two paragraphs above suggests: to get the partner into a desired
state of mind (i.e. to feel, understand, do, ... something).  In order
for any communication to occur, the content of the communication has to
be largely in the receiver, or to be embodied in the message in chunks
that are themselves already in the receiver.  In our work here, we tend
toward using the term "resonance" to describe the effect of a message.

But both the Smoliar example and the couples example say nothing about
symbolic or sub-symbolic processing.  What they indicate is that on these
occasions, the desired evocation could be done without using symbols patterns
that a third party would identify with the intention to create the specified
mental state.

(1) Taylor, M. M. International Journal of Man Machine Studies, March 1988,
vol 28, 175-218 and 219-257
Taylor, M. M. "Response timing in Layered Protocols: A cybernetic view of
natural dialogue" In M.M.Taylor, F.Neel, and D.G.Bouwhuis (Eds.) The Structure
of Multimodal Dialogue, Elsevier Science Publishers (North Holland), 1989.

Forgive the plug:-)
-- 
Martin Taylor (mmt@zorac.dciem.dnd.ca ...!uunet!dciem!mmt) (416) 635-2048
"Viola, the man in the room
doesn't UNDERSTAND Chinese. Q.E.D."  (R. Kohout)