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Article 2566 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1992Jan8.211644.3275@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 92 21:16:44 GMT
References: <5815@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991Dec12.193222.27298@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <5909@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 37

In article <5909@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>In article <1991Dec12.193222.27298@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>>In article <5815@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>>In article <1991Dec5.225949.2613@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>>
>>>>(1) Recipes are completely syntactic.
>>>>(2) Cakes are crumbly.
>>>>(3) Syntax is not sufficient for crumbliness.
>>>>(4) Therefore implementing the appropriate recipe cannot be sufficient
>>>>    to produce a cake.

>Nor is it clear that a recipe is treated as purely syntactic.
>It's necessary to know what words like "egg" and "flour" mean.

  When Dave Chalmers first posted this analogy, I replied to him by email
that he had obviously never opened a recipe book.  The ones I have seen are
far from syntactic.

  But in truth, that is a side issue.

  The point I thought Dave was getting as is this:

	The cake actually requires a recipe plus ingredients.  The crumbliness
	might come from the ingrediencts.

  Similarly, using a computer,

	The results of the computation depend on both the program and the
	data.  The program (instruction codes) are indeed syntactic.  But
	the semantics could be represented as data to be used by the
	program during execution.

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


