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Article 1989 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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tle!aiai!jeff
>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Robot Reply (was Re: Searle, again)
Message-ID: <5825@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Dec 91 21:24:39 GMT
References: <2127@ucl-cs.uucp> <91338.113617KELLYDK@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> <5796@skye.ed.ac.uk> <YAMAUCHI.91Dec5235651@heron.cs.rochester.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 22

In article <YAMAUCHI.91Dec5235651@heron.cs.rochester.edu> yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) writes:
>In article <5796@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>Searle considers robots, at least, because of the so-called
>>"robot reply": if you give the Room some sensors, the ability
>>to manipulate objects, etc, it will understand.  Searle points
>>out that the outputs of the sensors, the control instructions
>>for the manipulators, etc, are just more symbols that have to
>>-- somehow -- be given meanings.  So it's symbol manipulation
>>again.
>
>Yes, but it's not *just* symbol manipulation.  The point is that such
>a robot would be interacting with the real-world (or a close
>facsimile) and *that*is what attaches "semantic" (i.e. perceptual)
>meanings to "syntactic" symbols.

Looking at it from the inside, the input from sensors is just
more squiggle-squiggles and squoggle-squoggles.  That some of
them come from a camera while others are written down by a
person -- why does adding some of the former suddenly solve
the problem for all of the inputs involved?  `"senantic" (i.e.
perceptual)' is a huge argument on it's own, one you haven't
begun to make.


