From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!tdatirv!sarima Tue Apr  7 23:24:15 EDT 1992
Article 4930 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
>From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Challenge
Keywords: Searle, Chinese Room
Message-ID: <511@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 5 Apr 92 16:48:59 GMT
References: <centaur.700790865@cc.gatech.edu> <6419@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Apr1.150750.9618@cs.yale.edu> <1992Apr2.181357.25444@psych.toronto.edu>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 38

In article <1992Apr2.181357.25444@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
|As I have also noted recently, I am no longer convinced that the Chinese Room 
|example, as a demonstration of the axiom that syntax can't yield semantics,
|appropriately deals with the Systems Reply.  This is *not* to say that I
|necessarily have been converted to Functionalism, as I think the axiom is
|supported by the distinction made by linguists and philosophers between
|syntax and semantics, *and* by the fact that AI advocates offer no
|explanation of how the latter arises from the former, except faith.

I may not have a *detailed* model of how semantics emerges on top of
an essentially 'syntactic' functionality, but I do have an outline model.

I do not believe that any amount of pure reason (without observational
evidence) will ever show such a thing to be impossible, or possible.
It will only be through research on living minds and on computational
modelling that a detailed model can possibly be derived, or be shown
to be impossible.

|> but of course if Searle knew anything about computation we
|>wouldn't be discussing the Chinese Room in the first place.
|
|"But if the Strong-AI crowd knew anything about syntax and semantics, we
|wouldn't be discussing computer minds in the first place."

I believe I do understand syntax and semantics, linguistics is one of
my 'hobbies', and I have studied it extensively.

And I have yet to see an argument supporting 'no semantics from syntax'
that does not equally apply to the human brain.  No one has yet provided
a compelling, observatianally verified, model of how the *brain* could
generate semantics in any other way.

Yes there have been some clever models that seem to show this *may* be
possible, but none of them have any observatianal evidence to support
them, or even to show that they are actually possible.
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)


