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Article 2107 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: mcdermott-drew@CS.YALE.EDU (Drew McDermott)
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
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References: <1991Dec8.192843.6951@psych.toronto.edu> <1991Dec11.170157.27053@cs.yale.edu> <1991Dec11.203452.9419@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1991 20:43:24 GMT
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  In article <1991Dec11.203452.9419@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
  >>

  >>    Searle's point of the Chinese Room example is to show that
  >>   >while you may know what an English symbol refers to, you do *not* know
  >>   >what a Chinese symbol refers to, despite the fact that the behaviour is
  >>   >the same, that the symbols are used appropriately in both cases.
  >>
  [And I (Drew) said:]
  >>At the risk of repeating myself (and McCarthy), it matters not whether
  >>*I* know, so long as the virtual person instantiated by the program knows.
  >
  [and then he said:}
  >But how do *they* know?  And what the heck do you *mean* by "virtual person"?
  >And why can't *I*, by performing the appropriate operations, instantiate
  >one myself?
  >
  >- michael
  >

Zeleny made a similar objection to McCarthy's original article, and
there was not enough clarification, so let me try my hand.  I can see
cases where individuating virtual persons would be difficult, but in
the straightforward cases it's not hard at all.  Suppose that Searle's
hypothetical Chinese understander is written.  We run it on a
computer, and have a conversation with what appears to be a
Chinese-speaking person.  Now suppose we run the same program twice,
simultaneously, using the same I/O stream.  We'll initialize the
databases of the two copies differently, so they will seem slightly
different.  We can make sure they answer to different names.
So we could have amusing hypothetical dialogues like:

  Human: Hi, guys.
  Yin: Hi, Drew
  Yang: How have you been?
  Human: Fine.  Hey, Yin, I have a joke you'll like, and that prude Yang
     probably won't even get it.
  Yang: Watch it
  Yin: Don't listen to her -- go on.
  Human: A traveling salesman went into a restaurant and ordered a ....

And so forth.

What I mean by virtual persons in such a straightforward case is simply
the processes implementing Yin and Yang (and not any other process on
the same machine, such as the X-window server, which doesn't have all
the neat person-implementing properties that Searle is hypothesizing).

  >And why can't *I*, by performing the appropriate operations, instantiate
  >one myself?

You can!  You can even instantiate two or more at the same time.

                                             -- Drew McDermott


