custead (11/25/82)
.... If you were given a book in English which described how to combine the Chinese characters, and if the book was good enough, eventually you might get good enough at manipulating the formal symbols of Chinese to fool even a native Chinese speaker into thinking you knew Chinese, but you really don't. There are 2 fuzzy qualifications in the above: "if the book was good enough", and "eventually you might get good enough" YES...eventually you would get good enough at manipulating the symbols of Chinese to *fool* even a native Chinese speaker... this point would come when you had learned the rules of Chinese... To learn to manipulate these symbols that well you would come to learn the language...starting from scratch the way a child does... although "if the book was good enough" it could be a lot of help. So the last line... "but you really don't" is wrong...you really DO. You are given a series of symbols and they now are meaningful to you and you are able to give a meaningful reply. I myself can manipulate the symbols of English well enough to fool a native English speaker, but it has taken me years. By the way i do not know english and you cannot prove that I do. I am merely manipulating these symbols inside my head in response to some symbols that I saw on the net. If a computer is able to do this equally well, even if it "doesn't know English", I will say that it has passed the Turing Test. And as long as it can carry on an intelligent conversation (via symbol manipulation) it does not matter if you want to say "but it really doesn't KNOW English." custead of the western provinces