From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael Tue Apr  7 23:24:34 EDT 1992
Article 4964 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!psych.toronto.edu!michael
>From: michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar)
Subject: Re: The Challenge
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
References: <1992Apr1.150750.9618@cs.yale.edu> <1992Apr2.181357.25444@psych.toronto.edu> <511@tdatirv.UUCP>
Message-ID: <1992Apr7.222046.16470@psych.toronto.edu>
Keywords: Searle, Chinese Room
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 22:20:46 GMT

In article <511@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:

>I may not have a *detailed* model of how semantics emerges on top of
>an essentially 'syntactic' functionality, but I do have an outline model.

If you do, I (and presumably others) would be interested in seeing it.

>I do not believe that any amount of pure reason (without observational
>evidence) will ever show such a thing to be impossible, or possible.

Care to defend this view?  

>It will only be through research on living minds and on computational
>modelling that a detailed model can possibly be derived, or be shown
>to be impossible.

What *empirical* evidence would count?  Remember that we are arguing over
whether having the appropriate behaviour is sufficient evidence for
having a mind.  I may be wrong, but I see *no* way in which this is
amenable to empirical investigation.  

>And I have yet to see an argument supporting 'no semantics from syntax'
>that does not equally apply to the human brain.  No one has yet provided
>a compelling, observatianally verified, model of how the *brain* could
>generate semantics in any other way.
>

The difference between the brain and computers is that we *know* the 
brain produces meaning.  We *don't* know that computers do.  Even if we
don't know *how* the brain does it, we *can* rule out ways in which it
doesn't, e.g., angels dancing on pinheads.  The claim being made is that
we have independent reasons for ruling out functionalism as well, namely,
that syntax is insufficient of itself to yield semantics.  The truth of this
claim is independent of whether we *do* know how the brain does what it does. 


- michael



