newsuser@LTH.Se (LTH network news server) (03/08/89)
Mr. Steven Harnad, Princeton, has vigorously denied being a philosopher. It is really a pity that there are so few philosophers on the net :-) Now over to the room: 1. The example is very unrealistic in the first place. Before Searle would be able to produced good translations/answers, he would surely have learnt a lot of chinese. Let us forget this for the sake of argument. 2. One way of defining understanding is to say that anything acting in a certain way (answering questions in chinese) understands. In this sense, the Searle + room system has understanding. (Turing would have liked this sense, I think.) 3. Subjective understanding roughly means that a mind (introspectively) knows itself to have understanding. It is only this particular mind that can know itself to have understanding in this sense. Thus, Harnad's argument (that there is no subjective understanding by the Searle + room system) is simply wrong. The truth is that we don't know. There might be understanding minds all over the place, but as long as we can't observe any signs of them, we just don't know. So this attack on the "symbol crunching" fails. -- Jan Eric Larsson JanEric@Control.LTH.Se +46 46 108795 Department of Automatic Control Lund Institute of Technology "We watched the thermocouples dance to the Box 118, S-221 00 LUND, Sweden spirited tunes of a high frequency band."
rapaport@sunybcs.uucp (William J. Rapaport) (03/15/89)
In article <1989Mar8.153202.4302@LTH.Se> janeric@Control.LTH.Se (Jan Eric Larsson) writes: >... >It is really a pity that there are so few philosophers on the net :-) Well, there are _some_, even some who are also AI researchers, but this one, at least, prefers to abide by his published commentaries on Searle for now. See the following of mine: Rapaport, William J. (1985), "Machine Understanding and Data Abstraction in Searle's Chinese Room," _Proceedings of the 7th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society_ (_University of California at Irvine_) (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 341-345. Rapaport, William J. (1986), "Searle's Experiments with Thought," _Philosophy of Science_ 53: 271-279. Rapaport, William J. (1987), "Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and the Chinese-Room Argument," _Abacus_ 3 (Summer 1986) 6-17; correspondence, _Abacus_ 4 (Winter 1987) 6-7, _Abacus_ 4 (Spring 1987) 5-7. Rapaport, William J. (1988), "Syntactic Semantics: Foundations of Computational Natural-Language Understanding," in J. H. Fetzer (ed.) _Aspects of Artificial Intelligence_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers): 81-131. Rapaport, William J. (1988), "To Think or Not to Think" (critical study of Searle's _Minds, Brains and Science_), _Nous_ 22: 585-609. William J. Rapaport Associate Professor of Computer Science Co-Director, Graduate Group in Cognitive Science Interim Director, Graduate Research Initiative in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences Dept. of Computer Science||internet: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu SUNY Buffalo ||bitnet: rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet Buffalo, NY 14260 ||uucp: {decvax,watmath,rutgers}!sunybcs!rapaport (716) 636-3193, 3180 ||fax: (716) 636-3464