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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: Penrose and Searle (was Re: Roger Penrose's fixed ideas)
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Date: Wed, 23 Nov 1994 03:01:37 GMT
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jmc@white.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il (McCarthy John) writes:

>Imagine that the procedure that the man in the Chinese room were performing
>unbeknownst to him were simulating an abacus rather than translating Chinese.
>Would the Searle argument then prove that a machine can't do arithmetic?

He'd probably say that the machine doesn't "understand" arithmetic.
All I see is that he's defined "understanding" with his Chinese
room.


--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
