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Article 2561 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, again
Message-ID: <1992Jan8.204759.9392@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 92 20:47:59 GMT
References: <5826@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991Dec11.180924.37884@spss.com> <5907@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 59

In article <5907@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>If Searle's right that the CR doesn't understand chinese, it doesn't
>matter what the program is.  That's the whole point of the "rules": to
>be whatever program is supposedly the right one.  His argument doesn't
>depend on it being a particular kind of program.  Since it doesn't
>matter what the program is, it doesn't matter whether it contains
>a "huge amount of sensory and motor experience, and the concepts
>associated with them" (if we assume that "concepts" isn't meant
>in some question-begging sense.)

  Why don't we do a few "back of the envelope" calculations.

  The brain is thought to have a lot of computational power.  Let's assume
it is the equivalent of perhaps 1000 Cray supercomputers.

  Now on doing the sort of 'syntactical table lookup' that computers do,
a human might take at least one second, and perhaps much much more, to do
what a Cray does in a nano-second.  So we are going to need about 10^12
people in that Chinese room.  I hope the air conditioning is pretty powerful!

  The human mind is reputed to be capable of storing a lot of information,
which presumably a native Chinese speaker would have in his knowledge base
in order to understand the Chinese.  There probably are not enough trees
on the whole planet to produce the paper needed to print this data.

  --------

  The whole Chinese room scenario is bogus.  It is about like saying that
when a Chinese person speaks chinese, the individual cells of his body do
not understand, and hence the person himself could not understand.

  All that Searle has shown that a 1950's technology computer is not
powerful enough to emulate the mind.

>Moreover, Searle presents two arguments (the Chinese Room and "syntax
>isn't enough for semantics") that (if correct) show that something
>that can't be captured by a program is involved.

 What about the following as an attempt to paraphrase the syntax/semantics
issue:

  (1)	Computations in physics require real numbers.

  (2)	Computers use only 0 and 1, which are integers.

  (3)	You can't get real numbers out of integers.

  (4)	Therefore you cannot do computations in physics using computers.

 Perhaps I should comment on (3).  It may seem to be a patently false
assumption.  But remember that the Greek geometers used geometry to deal
with real numbers because they had serious problems dealing with (3).

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


