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Article 3315 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Illustrated Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1992Jan30.230420.8387@spss.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1992 23:04:20 GMT
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I'd like to play with your minds a bit, and address the issue of syntax
incorporating semantics, by describing a variant of the Chinese Room.

The difference is that the instruction books are now illustrated.
The instructions direct the man in the CR to certain pages with pictures.
Rules sometimes even specify actions to take based on what's in the pictures.

As it happens, when a Chinese message comes in from outside the room, the
instructions have the man consider each symbol in turn, and (among other
things) lead him to a page in one of the books with a particular picture.
A similar process occurs when the output message is generated.

Now my question is, does this change our intuition about whether the man 
will come to understand Chinese?  After all, it shouldn't take long to 
discover that a particular set of squiggles always leads to a picture of
a horse, another to a picture of a hat, etc.  Searle's complaint that there
is no way for him to discover the meaning of a symbol seems ungrounded here.

Does this Chinese Room With Pictures, then, understand Chinese?  

If it does, then perhaps it's easier to see how an AI program could refer
(it contains representations of the external world inside itself, different
in form but not in principle from the pictures in the instruction books).

If not, what's wrong with it?

(Warning: this story is just an intuition pump; I do not believe that 
meaning is really (only) pictures.)


