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Article 3939 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Feb23.044200.29383@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 23 Feb 92 04:42:00 GMT
References: <1992Feb19.172251.7320@psych.toronto.edu> <43686@dime.cs.umass.edu> <1992Feb22.234252.17095@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 23

In article <1992Feb22.234252.17095@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
>perspective, this is no argument at all. Searle is *giving* his 
>opponents that a human could accomplish this astounding feat (just
>as he gives them the possibility that a language could be reduced to
>a finite set of rules; a matter which leads to all sorts of confusion).

  Yes indeed.  It is very generous of Searle to give this single human the
superhuman ability to perform a task that might require a billion concurrent
human minds.

  But what the left hand giveth, the right hand taketh away.  After granting
the superhuman powers to allow him to perform the task, Searle suddenly
strips away all the extra power, and asks whether the single human mind
remaining could, merely by having shared the same body as those billion
concurrent minds, now understand Chinese.

  The argument is a very clever debating trick.  But it proves nothing.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


