🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <36550@mirror.UUCP> francis@mirror.UUCP (Joe Francis) writes:
>   Why the Chinese Room argument doesn't convince ME:

>   Searle hasn't given us a very clear description of the Chinese room,
>   but we can fill in some blanks from what he has told us.

To some extent he has. The original article is a critique of a program by Roger
Schank, a program that, according to Searle, does what the Chinese Room does,
and in the same way as that in which the Chinese Room does it.

In the article, he explains, sucessfully, 1) that the Chinese Room is in all
ways parallell to Schank's program, and, 2) that Schank's program is not
`intelligent' or, does not have `understanding'.

The place where he sort of takes off is when concludes that by 1) and 2), a
Universal Turing Machine cannot have understanding, hence no computer can have
understanding.

I feel that 1) and 2) are not really worth discussing from a `Does the program
work?' point of view. The program most likely can't cope with puns, and I can't
really see that it can learn, either. If Schank's program has memory, then so
does the Chinese room. 

I'm sort of on Searle's side. I can see that the brain possibly can run
programs for simple householding tasks, but I'm still not convinced that there
can be a direct mapping from sensory inputs to thinking to cognition - and
possibly some language of the brain - to output in the form of human language.

>  anything passing TT must be able to solve simple (and some
>  not so simple problems), demonstrating that 
>  Additionally, anything passing TT must be able to learn.  This
>  demonstrates that the book instructs Searle to modify itself.

Certainly. So Schank's program is not perfect. Neiter is the Chinese Room.

I'd like to see Searle designing a room that is equipped with a `newborn infant
script', geared to survival in a mean and hostile world, with a program that
can modify its script, a featuere that the programmer might call `an effect of
evolution'.

Shrink the room a lot and place it in the head of a `newborn infant robot'. Let
it interact socially with its environment. Sometimes, when I read CogSci
litterature, I wnder whether some of those researchers still remember what it
was to interact socially with people, rather than formally with computers:-)

The modifications may be triggered by the aid of procedures called `pleasure',
`pain', etc. The symbol pusher needs not know or understand what happens when
?he changes the program. By and by, the computer program that is being
instantiated in the baby's head should be able to learn both Chinese and
English.

Rolf Lindgren		| 	"The opinions expressed above are 
612 Bjerke Studentheim	|  	 not necessarily those of anyone"	
N-0589 OSLO 5		|  email: rolfl@ifi.uio.no  rolfl@humanist.uio.no