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Article 3017 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1992Jan22.201656.22109@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 22 Jan 92 20:16:56 GMT
References: <5949@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan12.214251.21761@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <6033@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 28

In article <6033@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>The analogy still seems skewed to me.  The design for the hardware 
>tells you how to build the machine.  That seems analogous to
>blueprints and recipes.  The program tells you how to build a
>machine, in a sense, by putting a "universal" machine into
>a state where it contains the machine language version of a
>program.  But a high-level language does not specify machine
>states in any direct way.

I'd put the point by saying that the program underspecifies the machine,
just as a blueprint or recipe does.  There are lots of given machines
that implement a given program, and lots of different houses that
implement a given blueprint, but they all have relevant properties in
common.

>So you won't make any claim that human understanding is just a
>matter of implementing a program?

I don't think that it's an important claim for AI to make.  There
may be a sense in which it's true.  What counts is that there exist
programs such that implementions of these programs have all the
essential features of mentality in humans.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


