From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!christo Mon Mar  9 18:33:47 EST 1992
Article 4131 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Feb28.165550.13014@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Feb25.175012.8924@oracorp.com> <1992Feb28.022105.28548@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1992 16:55:50 GMT

In article <1992Feb28.022105.28548@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>
>This misses the point that Searle's answer to the "virtual person"
>reply is entirely based on intuition (as are the answers made by
>pro-Searlians in this thread), more or less consisting of "Two
>minds in one head?  That's ridiculous!".  So anything that serves
>to weaken the intuition serves a purpose.
>
>Hofstadter's point, I take it, is that the intuitions that Searle is
>appealing to get their strongest support if we think about *real
>people*, for whom it seems ridiculous that the memorization of a
>bunch of rules could produce another mind.  But people with the
>capacity to memorize a whole Chinese-room rule set would be vastly
>different to anything in our experience: 

But Dave, surely "maybe things get radically different when they get
really complex" is just no argument at all. As I suggested earlier,
try the same project with an artifical language of, say, five symbols
and three rules. Then try it with ten symbols and six rules. Try it
with, say, all of the propositional calculus. That's a pretty complex
artificial language that is syntactically specififed. Is there any hint
that something mysterious is going on; that consciousness might slowly
be welling up of it own volition (pun intended)? No. Not one iota.
There's just no reason to believe that the syntactic specification
of Chinese would induce any such thing. Hofstadter and Dennett are
just thrashing about looking for a "maybe".

-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
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