🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Dec18.014229.18058@athena.mit.edu> crowston@athena.mit.edu (Kevin Crowston) writes:

>Searle seems to be saying that the Turing Test is meaningless as a test of
>understanding because the Chinese Room can pass it, even though the
>person in the Chinese Room doesn't understand Chinese.  But it seems to
>me that this argument equates the mind and the brain and thus mislocates 
>the thing doing the understanding.  I agree that the man in the room doesn't
>understand Chinese; but I would argue similarly that a computer, as a
>collection of wires and silicon, or a brain, as a blob of protoplasm,
>don't understand anything either.  In all three cases, the thing doing the
>understanding is the program not the hardware.

On reflection, I don't think you can dispose of the issue that easily
by differentiating between the program and the hardware.  The program
is a schema that describes the electronic state the hardware should
be in when the code file is loaded.  In a very real sense, then, the
shape of the physical machine has been altered by loading the code
file, just as much as if you had flipped switches within the machine
(as we used to do with the old panel switches).  So after the code is
loaded, there is actually a different physical machine there, just as
much as if one had gone out and bought a different machine.

Just because it isn't "hard" (i.e., you can't kick it, and it's easy
to change), doesn't mean it isn't a physical entity.
-- 
Sarge Gerbode -- UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!metapsy!sarge
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
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