agcr@ivax.doc.ic.ac.UK (Adrian G C Redgers) (03/11/88)
In article <8803020915.AA14044@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> gjoly@NSS.CS.UCL.AC.UK ("G. Joly", Birkbeck) writes: >...demonstration of the Chinese Room with two Chinese actors >and an English (only) speaking person in the room. >...[the anglophone] had no knowledge of written Chinese; he was merely >manipulating symbols (as computers do). > >..in terms of the Turing test, the room spoke Chinese, since it >satisfied the basic ideas of the test. Agreed that the operator could >not speak the language, but the language was spoken by the program he was >following. > >Does anybody have a ballpark figure for the time needed to run such a program >"by hand''? More or less than the age of the universe? a) I thought Searle's point was that humans might not "understand" Chinese (or English) and are simply manipulating symbols which model the world. The 'Chinese room' is then a brain. Personally I don't go for this because it doesn't give an adequate explanation of conciousness or 'intention'; which I know I've got even if no-one else does. Or was Searle pointing out that the room is unsatisfactory for those very reasons? Ballpark figure is human reaction time. [Searle proposed the room as a challenge for the symbolic-AI school, and would agree with your interpretation. This was discussed at great length in AIList a year or two ago. -- KIL] b) Last night (Wednesday March 9th) BBC1 showed 'Girls on Top' with French & Saunders and Ruby Wax. In it 'Saunders' acts as a jobber waving her arms around and making money in a share dealing room. After rising to dizzy heights of profit she 'crashes'. It transpires that she had no idea what her symbols meant to other dealers - she thought she was making a butterfly and then a bird.... The moral of the story is that 'meaning' or the 'real world' will always outwit (symbol manipulation) systems. I think Aristotle would disagree - but I don't. c) As Jon Silkin put it in his editor's introduction to the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry: Our humanity must never be outwitted by systems, and this is why we are at our most vital when our intelligence is in full and active cooperation with feeling. We shall never not be political again, and the best way to be this, among others, is to think and feel; and if this cooperative impulse is permeated with values we can decently share, we stand a chance, as a species, of survival. For that, I think, is what is at stake. Systems outwitted humanity to cause WW1. Time to move to newsgroup Aristotlelian.conspiracy. love (and peace), Adrian XXX