jps@cat.cmu.edu (James Salsman) (03/02/89)
You people! You should be ashamed for allowing yourselves to be misled by Searle's pointless drivel! Here are CMU, we don't just produce volumes of philosophical crap like most ivy-league social institutions that call themselves "Universities" -- we actually implement commercial systems. [1] It is quite clear that the manipulation of symbols for conversation in an exotic language would require an enormous about of computation. No human could ever manually deliver enough cycles in a lifetime to process the first word! Searle's idea of an english speaking person performing the computations to comprehend Chinese is plain stupid! The best you could hope to do would be to give the englishman a Chinese lexicon, and it should be plain to everyone that this totally misses the point. If you could call the simulation "consiousness" it would share that property with the driver. If that driver is a human, it is easy to see how this could be, but it also becomes clear that the "simulation consiousness" has much less processing power than the "driver consiousness." :James Salsman [1] However, for marketing reasons, the CMU administration has asked that we no longer call our knowledge-based expert systems and learning algorithims by the name "Artificial Intelligence" or "AI." This upsets Pittsburgh's large neo-Luddite factions. -- :James P. Salsman (jps@CAT.CMU.EDU) --