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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 23:30:38 GMT
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In article <39oqc8$9gb@news-rocq.inria.fr> ziane@monica.inria.fr (Mikal Ziane (Univ. Paris 5 and INRIA) ) writes:

>By the way, does anybody think that the Chinese room example could be improved,
>not to prove that a machine cannot be intelligent of course, but to clearly
>point out limitations of a purely behaviorist definition of AI like
>Turing's.

I do, sort of.  I think the CR is always going to be in trouble
with the system reply.  However, to refute Searle's CR it's
enough to say "Searle has failed to show the system (as opposed
to, maybe, the CPU) doesn't understand".  To go further and
say "the system understands" is question-begging.  But if you
accept the TT, then by supposition (Searle assumes a setup
capable to passing the TT), there's something that's understanding,
presumably the system.

This is rather unclear, but it's been a long day.

-- jd
