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Article 1996 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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jeff
>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, again
Message-ID: <5831@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Dec 91 22:31:56 GMT
References: <2127@ucl-cs.uucp> <91338.113617KELLYDK@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> <5796@skye.ed.ac.uk> <40346@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Distribution: sci.philosophy.tech
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 35

In article <40346@dime.cs.umass.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:
>Jeff Dalton writes:
>>More specifically the past discussion was about Searle's claim
>>that the input [to] the Chinese Room could be interpreted as almost
>>anything: stock reports, chess moves, etc.  McCarthy and O'Rourke
>>denied that it could.
>
>Although Jeff taught me many subtle lessons in that past discussion, I
>still do not believe that the Chinese Room symbol manipulations
>could "as well" be interpreted as moves in a chess game, which Searle
>claimed in his Scientific American article.

I would agree if the representation had to be fairly direct, not
of arbitrary encodings could be used.  In the latter case, there
might be a simpler interpretation as, say, Chinese.

On the other hand, looked at from the other side, what if someone
found a way to encode chess moves as Chinese and "hacked" the rules
used in the Chinese Room?  

Everyone outside could have great fun watching the poor person in
the Chinese Room playing really poor chess instead of conversing
interestingly in Chinese and could then pretend to be completely
surprised when the person in the room came out and said "Ok, guys,
I've figured out your little Chess trick.  Very funny."

They could all say "But it was Chinese!  See: look at this transcript.
Searle must have been right way back in that Scientific American
article!"

Instead of "could Chinese be interpreted as Chess?", ask "could
Chess be encoded as Chinese?".  (Or does this example depend too
much on "hacking" the rules?)

-- jeff


