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Article 2093 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Martian Room
Message-ID: <1991Dec13.060459.32308@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 13 Dec 91 06:04:59 GMT
References: <1991Dec12.195125.14719@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1991Dec12.195341.16163@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1991Dec13.043758.19880@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 35

In article <1991Dec13.043758.19880@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>Neil, I simply do not understand your point, or for that matter your example.
>What does it mean to get a computer "fluent in Chinese"?  How could such
>a program not follow "the letter of the rule book", i.e., its  
>program?!  There is some *very* weird shit going on here...

  I will agree that if you assume as an initial huypothesis that it is
impossible to have a computer which is fluent in Chinese, then you can
use Searle's argument to prove that it is impossible to have a computer
which is fluent in Chinese.  It that is all that Searle is trying to do,
then he has certainly confused many people.

  One mistake of the Chinese room argument is the assumption that you
can write down a rule book containing the program which completely
specifies the computer's behavior.  In my experience the computer's
behavior depends on both the program and the data.

  The Searle argument is based on the invalid assumption that the computer
would use only its program and the chinese problem data, and would not
use any other data which might be stored on its disk drives.  No wonder
it behaves like a person who is not allowed to use any accumulated knowledge
built up over the years.  By disallowing access to data, Searle has
crippled the computer, just as by disallowing a knowledge of Chinese he
has crippled the humans.

  I grant that you can not get semantics out of syntax.  But the computer
might well have access to a databank of semantic information that it uses
in its processing.  It is fallacious to assume that it can only depend on
its set of instructions.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


