From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!pindor Thu Feb 20 15:20:55 EST 1992
Article 3747 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!pindor
>From: pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Evidence that would falsify strong AI.
Message-ID: <1992Feb14.221018.22990@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCS Public Access
References: <1992Jan30.172057.7114@oracorp.com> <6185@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1992 22:10:18 GMT

In article <6185@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <1992Jan30.172057.7114@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:
>>I believe that he already answered that. He knows what it means for
>>Colin Garety to understand something, but he doesn't know what it
>>means for you to understand something. It is quite clear from the
>>endless debates on this subject that there is no agreed-upon meaning
>>of what it means for someone to understand.
>
>I don't think there's any great difficulty in understanding the
>difference between such things as reading a book written in a
>language one knows and reading one in a language one doesn't.
>That's the kind of "understanding" that's involved in the
>Chinese Room.
>
Has it happened to you that you read something, you understand all words but
still do not understand what the story is about?  How about a story which 
has a symbolic meaning, i.e. meaning which goes beyond its literal content?
And may be this is the meaning which CR picks out, meaning which is independant
of the fact that hamburger is made of meat and how it tastes.
You seem to completely disregard the fact that 'understanding' has a lot of
'faces'. That is why some people (me including) ask for defintion to make sure
that we are talking about the same thing.
>
>It's sufficient for me to see what difference is being considered.
>All the noise about "what does understand really mean" looks like
>just another way to avoid thinking about Searle's argument.
>
>Moreover, since a lot of people have little trouble in rejecting
>Searle's conclusion, without resolving exactly what "understand"
>means, I find it hard to see why it's such a problem.
>
May be some of them reject Searle's conclusion because  they feel that the
whole argument is using notions which are not sufficiently well defined.
>
>-- jd


-- 
Andrzej Pindor
University of Toronto
Computing Services
pindor@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca


