msellers@mentor.com (Mike Sellers) (01/10/90)
Paul Fahn writes: > [good analysis deleted for brevity] > > Let us look at Searle's recent twist to the problem: the man memorizes > the rules and answers Chinese questions in public. We the experimenters > watch him do this for two years and then must decide whether he > understands Chinese. A lot of people would conclude that he does indeed > understand Chinese, even if they "knew" that he was following rules. > > -------------- > Paul Fahn > pnf@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu The problem here, though, is that the man could still be passive. If the rules he has memorized tell him nothing about how to respond to specific enquiries from a conscious point of view, but only how to respond to questions in a linguistically suitable fashion, then he will cheerfully and unknowingly respond to questions such as "would you like us to boil your wife in oil?" with a cheerful "certainly; that sounds like a novel treat" and then be moderately concerned when his wife was led away by Chinese soldiers. If on the other hand these "rules" somehow are able to either generate or activate some awareness and personal agenda, our translator might well seem, to himself, to abandon the rules as they became more internalized. In fact, the rules would still be used on some processing level, but the semantic content grown out of them would have overshadowed them. Even in this case, however, the essence of awareness and purposefulness remains as difficult to isolate as ever. The question remains as to whether syntactic rules such as this can generate not only semantics but awareness of the semantic content. I am not at all sure that they can. If they can, it might seem to the inhabitant of the Chinese Room that he gradually is able to throw away the rules and respond "on his own," though the rules are still in fact being used. In a slightly different case, a computer using these rules might seem to itself to have awakened into consciousness, though its human cohorts would chortle to themselves about their ingenuity in creating a set of rules that could produce such "realistic" output. Of course, the computer would be hard-pressed to convince anyone else that it was not simply following rules. It is a good thing that we do not subject each other and especially our young children to such rigors, or a type of intellectual solipsism might become much more fashionable. -- Mike Sellers ...!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!msellers Mentor Graphics Corp. msellers@mntgfx.MENTOR.COM Electronic Packaging and Analysis Division -- AutoSurface Project "Amor est magis cognitivus quam cognitio"