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Article 3272 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Virtual Person?
Message-ID: <1992Jan29.192858.25598@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 29 Jan 92 19:28:58 GMT
References: <1992Jan23.221609.1443@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Jan24.171454.7033@aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Jan29.004822.23755@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
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In article <1992Jan29.004822.23755@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Jan24.171454.7033@aisb.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>>Remember that the symbols are Chinese characters (or something like
>>that).  This is clear for at least some of them, because they're being
>>used for the I/O of the conversation.  Searle's point, at least some
>>of the time, is that the person in the room can't figure out what
>>the symbols in the conversation mean.  All he knows is that squiggle
>>squiggle follows squoggle squoggle -- things like that.
>
>Only a trivial few of the symbols will be Chinese characters -- the
>peripheral ones for input/output.

I don't think that claim can be supported from the text.  Rather than
type in more quotes, I'll just repeat what I quoted in the message
you're answering.  It's from the 2nd Reith Lecture:

  The rules specify the manipulations of the symbols purely
  formally, in terms of their syntax, not their semantics.
  So a rule might say: `Take a squiggle-squiggle sign out of
  basket number one and put it next to a squoggle-squoggle 
  sign from basket number two.'
  ...
  There you are, locked in your room, shuffling your Chinese symbols,
  ...  On the basis of the situation as I have described it, there's
  no way you could learn any Chinese simply be manipulating these
  formal symbols.

If it's not clear already, it should be clear from the rest of the
paragraph that it's not just the I/O symbols that are Chinese in this
version of the argument.

However, my main point was not how many of the symbols wre Chinese but
that at least some of the time the issue for Searle is that the
symbols are manipulated only on the basis of their formal properties
(such as their shape) and that they can never acquire meaning.  Searle
makes a similar point when he says that the I/O of the room could just
as well be interpreted as moves in a Chess game.

The point here seems to be that programs can speccify only syntactic
manipulations.  Implementations of programs might be causal structures
(and I'm sure Searle knows that various causes and effects happen in
a computer as a result of getting it to run a program, and that the
program determines the general structure of those causes and effects),
but if the resulting system can perform only syntactic processing,
there's still a "syntax isn't enough for semantics point" to be
addressed.

-- jd


