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Article 4218 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: shibe@leland.Stanford.EDU (Eric Schaible)
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Mar3.095145.18304@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Keywords: Digital Iconoclasm
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Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
References: <1992Feb28.211025.26278@oracorp.com> <1992Feb29.162020.9271@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Mar3.025214.26880@smsc.sony.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 92 09:51:45 GMT
Lines: 70

In article <1992Mar3.025214.26880@smsc.sony.com>, markc@smsc.sony.com (Mark Corscadden) writes:
|> 
|> 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!  

First of all, you have not established that a person can have abilities of
which they are completely unaware, you have merely told a story in which
you have more or less stipulated that this is the case.

However, suppose I argue as follows:  The attribution of understanding
requires a phenomenological experience of understanding.
If there is no experience of understanding, we want to say that there is
no understanding (unless we are behaviorists), despite behavioral evidence
to the contrary.   In the case of the Chinese Room, this amounts to saying
that the squiggles and squaggles mean something; to be more explicit about
what this entails--that there is an experience of the squiggles and
squaggles meaning something.   If something (the system, say) 
is not experiencing the squiggles/squaggles as meaningful, we cannot say that 
the squiggles/squaggles mean anything to the system.   (Again, unless we are
behaviorists.)  So a phenomenological experience of understanding is a 
necessary condition for the attribution of understanding.   

Therefore:
If the internalized-CR subsystem understands Chinese, then it must be 
having a phenomenological experience of understanding Chinese.
Do you wish to claim that this is the case?


If so, what you're saying is this:  the man, having internalized the system,
is consciously carrying out the rules of the system.   Moreover, he is
generating a phenomenological experience of understanding Chinese, although
he is not the one doing the experiencing.  Although he is the intentional
agent which is causing the processing to be done, the experience is had by
a (presumably nonintentional) subsystem; namely, the system of rules which
the man internalized.

Now:  is this internalized system of rules the sort of thing which might have
phenomenological experiences?  My intuition is that it is not.

A further argument along these lines, a twist on one of Searle's:
the rules of the Chinese Room constitute a program.  One of the hallmarks of
a program is that it can be implemented on any appropriate sort of 
computational hardware.  As it happens, one can build a computer by wiring
together all of the mailboxes in Dubuque (flag up=1, down=0), and one could
attach an output device which gives out Chinese characters.  Now, if we
implement the Chinese Room program in the Dubuque computer, we must conclude
the following:

The mailboxes in Dubuque are having a collective experience of understanding
Chinese.


Do you agree?

Eric Schaible


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