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Article 2647 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
Message-ID: <5954@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Jan 92 20:27:08 GMT
References: <5815@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1991Dec12.193222.27298@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <5909@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan8.211644.3275@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 39

In article <1992Jan8.211644.3275@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>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.

I don't think that can be right.  Having data is just like having
a different program.  Indeed, all of the data might be in the form
of functions (there are well-known lambda-calculus ways of doing
that) and hence be instruction codes.

-- jeff


