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Article 3132 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: Searle and the Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1992Jan24.224516.12635@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1992Jan23.222251.24486@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan23.230213.5114@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan24.150146.4702@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 92 22:45:16 GMT
Lines: 62

In article <1992Jan24.150146.4702@aisb.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>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.

Recipes and cakes, like programs and computational systems, are
connected by an "implements" relation, and it's a determinate
matter whether a cake/system implements a recipe/program.  That's
all the analogy needs.

If you really want to find something that's analogous to
"ingredients" (which isn't strictly necessary for the success
of the analogy), consider the role that the clause "cherries round
the edges" plays in the recipe.  It constrains the possible range
of "implementations" in a particular way, by imposing the condition
that implementations have to satisfy a particular physical condition
(i.e., it must consist in part of cherries, and so on).  Similar,
the clause "for i:=1 to 5 do a:=a+i" constrains the possible
range of implementing computational systems, by imposing the
condition that implementations have to satisfy a particular
physical condition (here, this physical condition is a matter
of causal organization).  There's the analogy, irrelevant though
it is.

The division of the recipe into an "ingredient" section and a
"process" section is just irrelevant here.  All that counts is that
the recipe as a whole determines a range of possible physical
systems, i.e. cakes, that satisfy it.

>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.

The only point of this argument is to show that the "syntax isn't
sufficient for semantics" argument doesn't work, as the fact
that programs are syntactic doesn't mean that *implementations*
of programs are syntactic (any more than recipes being syntactic
means that cakes are syntactic) -- rather, implementations are real,
physical, complex causal systems.  Now, it may be the case that
"causal organization isn't sufficient for semantics", but that
would require a separate argument.

>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.

Thanks, but the Crumbly Cake Reply addresses a different argument,
i.e. the syntax/semantics argument.  The Systems Reply is still the
right reply to the Chinese room argument, of course.

-- 
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."


