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Article 1306 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: clarke@next1 (Thomas Clarke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese Room Variant
Message-ID: <1991Nov12.131428.4850@osceola.cs.ucf.edu>
Date: 12 Nov 91 13:14:28 GMT
References: <1991Nov8.170856.21527@psych.toronto.edu>
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The two replies raise interesting questions:

>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)

>These arguments often depend for their plausibility on extraneous factors--
>in this case, on renaming the integers with arbitrary signs...
>The meat of the problem, of course, is that the child has not been taught
>any correspondence between the rules he is learning and any actual use of
>them.

The renaming is meant to draw attention to to just the assertion that rules
alone are insufficient. Clearly, to the writer at least,  understanding resides
in the complex relationship between the abstract symbol world and the actual
physical world.  The real problem is whether the example can be generalized.
That is, the bare rules of computation plus any finite set of additional 
usage/correspondence rules are not sufficient for an understanding of number. 

>From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)

>What I don't understand is 
>why you are, then, not convinced by Searle's version. 

Chinese is too complicated.  I could never be sure that the large number 
(exponential complexity?) of operations carried out by the man in the room
wouldn't lead in some emergent way to true intelligence/consciousness.
Arithmetic is simpler (apologies to Godel) and I think I understand it.


