From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mips!mips!smsc.sony.com!markc Mon Mar  9 18:34:42 EST 1992
Article 4210 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markc@smsc.sony.com (Mark Corscadden)
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Mar3.025214.26880@smsc.sony.com>
Organization: Sony Microsystems Corp, San Jose, CA
References: <1992Feb28.211025.26278@oracorp.com> <1992Feb29.162020.9271@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 92 02:52:14 GMT

In article <1992Feb29.162020.9271@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
>The charge of "obscurantism" is not name-calling. It is a fair characterization
>IMHO of the sort of diversionary tactic being used here. If you haven't been
>following the thread closely, then you're entitled, I suppose, to not realize
>that the question of in "what way" the system is part of the man.
>The "way" is very simple. In the "way" that he memorized the whole system.
>In the "way" that there is no system apart from the cognitive activities
>of the man. 

The charge of "obscurantism" is indeed name-calling.  It makes it
impossible for you to acknowledge that a person who is disagreeing
with your point might have a legitimate, if flawed, argument; they
are automatically branded as pursuing obscurantism and not legitimate
reasoning.  I have been following this thread too and I also believe
that the systems answer is not being understood by you and others here.

Can you imagine memorizing a large look-up table of actions and then
carrying out the actions called for by the table without ever having
any personal understanding of the purpose behind the actions?  Even
when virtually anyone in a position to watch your table-driven actions
from, say, an outside perspective unavailable to you, would have no problem
understanding their purpose?  I have no trouble imagining such a state
of affairs.  It's clear (to me) that a person can implement, using their
memory alone, a behavior which they throughly fail to understand.  Thus
the system, in spite of the fact that it is a strict and proper subset of
the person who is implementing it, can have properties of which the person
implementing it is wholly ignorant.  There "is no system apart from the
cognitive activities of the man", but circumstances have been contrived
so that the man only understands his own cognitive activities in terms
of rote recall and may be totally unaware of the meaning of his own
cognitive activities!

A bit more abstractly, it is clear that a system can be memorized by
a person, and thus be completely contained within that person's mind,
while at the same time that person remains thoroughly ignorant of some
fundamental properties, call them X, Y, and Z, which the system possesses.
To then ask that person whether their mind has properties X, Y, and Z and
to insist that their answer *must* be accurate is simply wrong; if your
sole justification is the fact that, by the nature of the properties X, Y,
and Z, any mind which contains a subsystem possessing those properties must
possess them itself.

Concretely: suppose I analyze a simple game X of which you have *no*
personal knowledge, and then create a look-up table which maps each
game situation to a choice of move.  Unlike the Chinese look-up table,
this could be realized in an actual experiment if the game chosen was
simple enough.  Then we can easily arrange circumstances in which all
of the following hold:

1)  The table which you have memorized allows you to play a great
    game of X.

2)  You yourself, not "just a subsystem within you", are capable of
    playing a great game of X, because the table has been completely
    internalized by you.  There is no system apart from your own
    cognitive activities at this point.

3)  When asked whether you can play game X, you must honestly answer
    at best that you don't know and at worst that you do not play,
    because you are wholly ignorant of the meaning of the table you
    have memorized.

This establishes that a person can have abilities of which they are
completely unaware, and that an excellent way to produce this state
of affairs is to have people blindly memorize look-up tables!  It
establishes that a person's belief that they cannot play a great
game of X, or cannot understand Chinese, is throughly suspect when
that person has just blindly memorized an immense table which is aimed
precisely at giving them that ability while denying them any understanding
or awareness of the ability they have been so given.

Can you justify calling this "obscurantism"?  I believe that the
argument above demonstrates that introducing the mechanism of blindly
memorizing immense tables without understanding them is very likely
to directly produce conditions within a person in which they have
sweeping capabilities of which they are completely ignorant.  This
in spite of the fact that people who come by identical abilities
without the artifice of memorizing tables will invariably have a
perfectly fine awareness of their newly acquired abilities.  I assume
that you must assert that I am wrong; that the argument I give is
somehow flawed.  Would you also have to assert that it is obscurantism,
either unconscious or intentional?

Mark Corscadden
markc@smsc.sony.com
work: (408)944-4086


