🚀 go-pugleaf

Perhaps I don't follow Searle's arguments entirely, but to me the
"Chinese Room" seems to be equivalent to claiming that humans cannot
"understand" mathematics.

As I read Searle, I am struck by the similarity between the Chinese
Room and how I felt in many of my mathematics classes. The maths
instructor stood at the board and made squiggly marks, and then
proceded to show the class a set of rules whereby we should transform
the squiggly marks into other squiggly marks. When I went home to
practice putting squiggly marks into other squiggly marks, at first I
was entirely at the mercy of the rulebook. But after some time I
memorized the rules, and applying them became considerably less
tedious. What is more, at some point (and I'm not at sure just when)
the symbols began to take on some kind of *meaning* for me. That is, I
didn't just have the syntax, I started to obtain semantics. When that
occurred, I felt I was "understanding" mathematics. In fact, this
feeling was as solid and reassuring as my sense of "understanding"
anything else.

Now the problem in light of Searle's argument is obvious. Namely,
*where* did this semantics come from? For what is mathematics, but a
vast body of purely abstract symbol manipulation? No concept in
mathematics has any direct grounding in any observable physical
phenomenon. I cannot go into the field and observe the number "3"
directly. Nothing I saw in maths class had any power of physical
causation. Every symbol the instructor put on the board, (s)he
described entirely in terms of other symbols.

If I accept Searle's conclusion, that neither Searle nor the Chinese
Room "understands" Chinese, then I must also conclude that neither I
nor any other entity can "understand" mathematics. What I believe to
be my understanding of mathematics must be illusory.

By saying this I hope to point out that I think Searle is overlooking
something. He gives us the Chinese Room to show us how pure symbol
pushing can't produce understanding, but he neglects to mention what
happens to *people* who spend sufficient time there. I submit that if
Searle spent years in the Chinese Room, dutifully accepting incoming
squiggles, looking up the rules to process them, and totting up the
proper outgoing symbols, in time he would come to "understand" Chinese
EXACTLY as he has already come to "understand" mathematics. That is,
as he practiced he would progressively find himself going to the
rulebook less and less, yet still producing "correct" answers. In
time, he would internalize enough of the rulebook that he could toss
it aside altogether. If he was clever enough, then (just like a
budding mathematician) he would start making up *new* rules (perhaps
by superposing sets of the original rules). He would eventually reach
a point where he could be making sense of incoming squiggles that
weren't in the original rulebook at all, because he would by then
be extracting new information from novel incoming symbols.

In other words, syntax *can* (somehow) give rise to semantics. Yes,
you may need something "smarter" in the Chinese Room than a
combination of present-day digital computer hardware and software, but
I think that is immaterial. Searle's thrust is that *no matter who* is
in the Chinese Room, as long as he/she/it starts off with no knowledge
of Chinese and only a list of rules, he/she/it can never arrive at
an "understanding" of what is going on. If that is true, then all
mathematicians are imposters. They believe they have semantics, but
according to Searle they do not.

Dan Mocsny
dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu