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Article 3119 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: <1992Jan24.150146.4702@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Jan 92 15:01:46 GMT
References: <1992Jan22.201656.22109@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan23.222251.24486@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan23.230213.5114@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
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In article <1992Jan23.230213.5114@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Jan23.222251.24486@aisb.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>>You get a cake, or not, depending on the ingrediants.  So
>>you get crumbliness or not, depending on the ingrediants.
>>The analogy would be that you get intentionality or not,
>>depending on the ingrediants (eg, whether it's a brain or
>>a sun4).
>
>I've gone over this a zillion times, and I have nothing more
>to add.  (In the analogy, the ingredients of the cake are
>analogous to the causal properties of the system -- both being
>determined by the program/recipe.  Whether, in fact, causal
>properties are sufficient for mentality is a separate question.)

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then.

I just don't see how if you line up programs and recipes and
compare them that there's anything in the program text that
corresponds to saying what the ingrediants have to be.  The
entire program corresponds to the instructions in the recipe
for how to manipluate the ingredients.  Eg, bake for 15 minutes
corresponds to sort into increasing order, or something.

The closest I can come is to make ingrediants correspond to
types, but that still leaves us with the problem that it's
our human understanding of the words in a recipe that lets
us determine what ingrediants are appropriate, while a program
can work on anything for which the required formal properties
can be defined.  For example, you can sort anything for which
you can define less-than.

Moreover, the whole point of argument by analogy is to have something
that clearly has a certain property and that clearly corresponds to
something where the presence of this property is harder to see.
Otherwise the problem will be just as difficult (or more difficult)
in the analogous case as it was in the original.  Moreover, it
doesn't always work to _specify_ a the correspondence, if some
other correspondence fits just as well or if the specified
correspondence is hard to see or understand.

Maybe some day I'll wake up and "see" what you're getting at,
but for now this analogy of yours just doesn't work for me. 
I think when this started you thought that anyone who looked at your
cake argument and placed it next to Searle's would see what was wrong
with Searle's argument.  As far as I'm concerned you'd have done
better just to say directly what you thought was wrong.

That said, however, I think it would be much more fun, and
the world would be a better place, if Searle were defeated
by the Crumbly Cake Reply than if it was by the boring old
Systems Reply.

-- jd


