🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4941.25b48ec4@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk> ian@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk writes:
>In article <1585@uniol.UUCP>, schwuchow@uniol.UUCP (Michael Schwuchow) writes:
>> IMHO the code-breaking of Mayan codices, Egyption hieroglyphics and so on
>> is not only based on syntactic knowledge, but on known semantics too.
>> The Mayas, the Egyptians are humans too. So you can suppose about what they
>> had written. Their culture is not totally lost, but relicts were traduced.
>> So you can fix some words like king, duke ,servant, slave; sun, water, rain,
>> moon, season; build, fight, govern; saw, grow, harvest, ... relatively
>> easy, because you can suppose, what a text could mean.
>> 
>But, you would need to know something of Chinese culture to perform
>translation.  One verb in English may be translated in several ways in
>Chinese, dependant on the status of the participants.  To translate this,
>there would be rules describing the relationships between kings, dukes,
>servants and slaves.  Thus, some semantic knowledge must be included in the
>syntatic knowledge.

The Chinese Room argument doesn't really depend on the operator being
ignorant of Chinese.  Of course, Searle makes a big deal out of it, but
IMHO that is a symptom of his argument's being directed more toward our
prejudices than toward our reason.

Suppose the rule book for transforming input into output were written in
Chinese, and the operator were a native speaker.  The process occurring in
the room would still be entirely syntactic.   Searle shouldn't need any
more than this to draw his intended conclusion - that the operation of
the room lacks crucial attributes of mental processes, namely semantics.

The situation remains the same if a Chinese speaker memorizes Chinese
rules and uses them to transform verbal inputs into spoken outputs.  The
transformation is stil based entirely on syntax.

To object to the Chinese Room argument on the grounds that the room is
not really semantics-free, it's necessary to present examples of semantic
operations entering into the procedures specified in the rules.  A rule
such as "If the input is <xxxx>, then look at your watch and select symbol
<x> based on the hour and symbol <y> based on the minute".  Such a rule
has semantic content because the terms "hour", "minute", and "your watch"
do not refer to symbols or symbol-types.