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Article 1641 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu (Franklin Boyle)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Searle, again
Message-ID: <EdAdwcC00Uh782NgUD@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 26 Nov 91 19:23:20 GMT
Organization: Cntr for Design of Educational Computing, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 57

Rolf Lindgren writes:

>>	3 The flaw of Searle's argument is 
>>		- The Rule Book is removed from the vital contexts of
>>		  social and cognitive development. The ``understanding''
>>		  is in the book.

No, the "understanding" is in the heads of the people that wrote
the book, and they're not in the book or the room.  Otherwise
you would seem to be contradicting yourself by arguing Searle's point
based on the relationship between language and social interaction.  
Thus, I assume you probably meant that understanding is reflected in 
the book's having been created.  

In any case, there is nothing about the physical forms of the symbols
in the book or the symbols fed into the room which physically
resembles the forms and structures of the objects and relationships
that those symbols are purportedly about.  How can one have
"information" about what it is they are about without acquiring
images (visual, somatosensory, tonotopic) of the physical structures 
of those things, their relationships to other things, etc.?  Seems 
to me all you have is information about the symbols that are doing the
representing (and *their* relationships to each other) primarily
because you actually see them.

Try to decode a set of symbols with no physical resemblence to
what it is they supposedly encode, especially when you have no
idea what the forms of those things are. You can't spontaneously create 
the information from the encoding. (Of course, you could guess, based 
on what you already know about the world, but that involves accessing
information you already have from your previous interaction with the 
world).  Presumably, our understanding of things, at least in part,
comes from our having interacted with them, or things similar.  How 
can a bunch of arbitrary forms give us this same kind of understanding 
(that which Searle is talking about and which we experience)?

If you think you can "understand" from the symbols and rules alone, then
imagine yourself in a variant of the Chinese Room, call it the "Nonsense
Room". Assume that the rule book contains a bunch of "rules" (there can be
rule sequences, not just stand alone rules) which were, for the
most part, randomly generated and make no sense or provide no consistency
or correlations to things in the outside world whatsoever.  They are,
by definition, meaningless symbols, so there would be no understanding
to be had, at least not anything that was intended by the creator of those
rules. The only things the people who created such a book have to 
do is feed you symbols which match to the left hand sides of the 
rules so as to enable you to be able to carry out a procedure 
similar to the person in the Chinese Room.
They would simply feed in characters that would "activate" all sorts
of rules, and we will assume that the apparent complexity of the
resulting rule-following will be comparable in the two cases 
(the rule book creators were at least a little bit clever).  Now, if
you think that Chinese symbols have something which the nonsense symbols
don't such that you would acquire an understanding of Chinese, then
please let me know where it comes from.

Frank Boyle


