X-Message-Number: 422 From att!Venus.YCC.Yale.Edu!LEVY%GARY Tue Sep 3 15:05 EST 1991 Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1991 15:05 EST From: LEVY% Subject: CRYONICS #??? - Chinese Room To: I apologize for not recalling the number/author of the Chinese Room posting, which I've lost. I'd like to address the issue. To recap, the Chinese Room argument goes something like this.... If you could give a person or computer a sophisticated enough set of instructions about the Chinese language, you could place that person/computer in a room and have messages sent into the room in Chinese. The person/computer would use the instructions to answer the message in Chinese, and an observer outside the room wouldn't realize that the person/computer didn't "know" Chinese at all. There's only one problem with this argument, but it's a fatal one. No one has ever succeeded in writing a set of instructions, for either computers or human beings, which could successfully reproduce even the most rudimentary abilities of a fluent Chinese speaker (or a speaker of any other natural language, for that matter). Language is one of those activities that has to be learned in order to be mimicked. Sure, a clever person with a good grammar and dictionary could come up with a response in half an day or so, but who would be fooled by that? As for computers, nobody has figured out how to give one of them the real-world experience it would need to produce the right answers. So Searle's Chinese Room argument sounds like a serious Gedankenexperiment, but its assumptions are so far off base that I can't see any reason to be puzzeled, encouraged, or otherwise affected by it in your thinking about thinking. -- Simon Levy Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=422