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Article 4023 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Feb25.183336.13258@oracorp.com>
Date: 25 Feb 92 18:33:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: oracorp.1992Feb25.183336.13258
Organization: ORA Corporation
Lines: 28

Christopher Green writes:

> The systems reply says: it's not the man in the room that understands
> but the system as a whole: the man, the room, the slips of paper, the
> rule books, etc.

> Searle responds: fine. Put the whole system in the man. Have him
> memorize the symbols, the rules, etc., and get rid of the room. Have
> him walk about like a sort of Chinese deaf-mute who can only
> communicate via written messages. Now you've got the system in the man
> and can discover whether the system understands any better than did
> the man-as-part-of-the-system.  You ask him -- the system -- whether
> it understands Chinese.  He still replies "in his native language"
> that he doesn't understand a word of Chinese.

Searle's response to the Systems Reply proves one thing, mainly that
Searle doesn't understand what a system is. He seems to be assuming
that there is a one-to-one correspondence between "systems" and
"physical objects" (of course, this mistake was encouraged by whoever
made the original Systems Reply when he talked about "slips of paper,
etc.") What Searle's thought experiment shows is that, assuming the
Systems Reply is correct, a human brain can simultaneously implement
more than one system. (I suppose that this gets back to the "Multiple
Personality Disorder" thread.)

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY


