🚀 go-pugleaf

kpfleger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Karl Robert Pfleger) writes:
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Which brings us to the point I made a few posts back, I think to
this group. The point is that most of the Searle article rests on
definitions. Here the one in question is symbol manipulation. The more
critical one, I think, is understanding. Also, intelligence is a key
one. The whole conclusion of the argument is that the system can't
'understand' or won't be 'intelligent.' But these things are never
defined.
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I interpret Searle's argument as follows:

There is something we (humans) do, called understanding.  We usually
know when we do it, and we can often say when others do or do not
understand.  We can also give examples of, say, a computer system
``not understanding'', as when it bills someone for $0.00 and causes
increasingly threatening letters to be send demanding payment.

So we then assume that we have a system based on manipulating and
transforming what we will loosely call symbols, or what I would call
physical patterns.  Let's say (counterfactually) that this system can
take written input from a Chinese and then produce written output that
the Chinese would interpret as being an intelligent reply.  Suppose
this were a program running on a computer, it would pass the Turing
test.

Now if someone emulates this system by hand, manipulating the patterns
in an equivalent way, this person can legitimately claim that he
doesn't understand Chinese, yet he can follow the rules and produce
the desired results.  Assuming we are using books and paper, the only
physical apparatus existing is the books, paper, and the person who
doesn't understand Chinese.  The question is, what understands
Chinese?  Searle claims that there is nothing there to understand
Chinese.

If one claims that the ``system'' somehow understands Chinese, Searle
says that you can do away with the books and paper, and memorize the
rules.  The person doing the manipulation will still not understand
Chinese, and there is no other physical entity left to be a candidate
for understanding.

From this, Searle concludes that the Chinese room does not understand,
that is, it does not share in the experience that we are talking about
when we use the word understand.

Thus, I don't think it is necessary to pin down the word `understand'
any more carefully.

I would also say that a computer doesn't manipulate symbols.  It
transforms one physical state or set of physical patterns into another
physical state.  As far as I know, it does not do anything other than
this.  We (thinking humans) interpret those physical states as symbols
in an arbitrary fashion.  We then go on to derive meaning from those
symbols.  Thus we interpret the computer's behavior to be pertinent to
the process we call thinking.  I see little difference between this
and the idea that a saw knows about architecture because it performs
functions we find useful when building buildings.

-Fred Gilham    gilham@csl.sri.com