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Article 1943 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: orourke@unix1.cs.umass.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Searle, again
Message-ID: <40346@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Date: 8 Dec 91 01:49:47 GMT
References: <2127@ucl-cs.uucp> <91338.113617KELLYDK@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> <5796@skye.ed.ac.uk>
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Reply-To: orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
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Jeff Dalton writes:
>More specifically the past discussion was about Searle's claim
>that the input [to] the Chinese Room could be interpreted as almost
>anything: stock reports, chess moves, etc.  McCarthy and O'Rourke
>denied that it could.

Although Jeff taught me many subtle lessons in that past discussion, I
still do not believe that the Chinese Room symbol manipulations
could "as well" be interpreted as moves in a chess game, which Searle
claimed in his Scientific American article. Perhaps a few isolated groups
of manipulations, extracted from their context, could be.  But to find
a chess interpretation of a long stream of manipulations, millions and
millions of manipulations, an interpretation that makes coherent and
consistent sense of *all* the Chinese language understanding manipulations 
as chess moves (or as manipulations a chess playing program), remains
to me beyond belief.


