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


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