Xref: utzoo comp.ai:4798 sci.lang:5265 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!unix!chips.sri.com!ellis From: ellis@chips.sri.com (Michael Ellis) Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.lang Subject: Re: Chinese Room Message-ID: <4024@unix.SRI.COM> Date: 30 Sep 89 02:49:04 GMT References: <89269.042406MIY1@PSUVM.BITNET> Sender: news@unix.SRI.COM Reply-To: ellis@chips.sri.com.UUCP (Michael Ellis) Followup-To: comp.ai Organization: Berkeley Private Language Institute Lines: 81 > N Bourbaki >> Rick Wojcik >>The conduit metaphor >>is very powerful and useful as a means of illuminating the behavior of >>language, but, like all analogies, it breaks down. Those who deal with real >>language to language translation know that there is no one-to-one match >>between expressions in one language and those in another. >But this difficulty would affect the native Chinese speaker and the >Chinese Room Demon equally. That is one premise of Searle's >argument - the "mechanical" system is presumed to be just as competent >(not necesarily perfect) at translation as the "understanding" system. >Searle would have you believe that the "mechanical" system lacks >true understanding because it lacks "intentionality". As far as I can tell, Searle *is* a mechanist (I have also heard him called a "weird sort of dialectical materialist"). He believes that the mind is "caused by" the neurophysiological mechanism of the brain, and that eventually there will be a purely scientific (read "physicalistic and mechanistic" here) account of the mind. I noticed the scare quotes: "intentionality". If you aren't familiar with this concept, you might try reading Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, Dreyfus, Searle, Putnam and Dennett for different treatments. I think it is fair to say that, for Searle, understanding presupposes intentionality practically by definition. >But this begs the question, and leads immediately to the "other minds" >problem. Maybe it is begging the question to assume that minds exist, that you got one, that I got one, that everybody's got one, that minds are the paradigm case of something that understands, and that it is the mind's ability to understand that we want to know more about. If you don't accept this you and John Searle aren't talking the same language. >Searle acknowledges this objection in _Minds, Brains, and Programs_, >but shrugs it off as only being worth "a short reply", basically that >cognitive states are not created equal, and that systems which exhibit >intentionality are more worthy of being described as "understanding" >than formal symbol-manipulating systems. If by "cognitive state" you mean something that is formally equivalent to the execution state of a computer, Searle is saying that such a thing is totally irrelevant to the question of mind. He does not deny that a computer might be conscious. He is saying is that, if and when a conscious machine is built, its understanding would not be caused by virtue of running the right program. >The gist of his conundrum is not to validate (or invalidate) any particular >linguistic theory, but to attack so-called "strong AI". I don't find it a >very convincing argument. It seems too much like vitalism -- that >there is something special about brains that cannot be duplicated by >artificial means. Searle might be wrong, but not for the reasons you offer, since you don't quite seem to be arguing against anything Searle said. As far as attacks on theories of language, Searle says unkind things about Skinner, Chomsky/Fodor, and Quine. As to vitalism, Searle says unkind things about that, too. Whether intentionalistic theories are vitalism in diguise, I do not think so, but I suppose there are many who might disagree. Vitalism was a philosophical and scientific dead end. Is the same true of intentionality? Well, the topic seems to be showing up more these days in scientifically minded AngloAmerican thought. I am not competent to judge whether of not intentionality can be made into a rigorous concept, but I suspect that the question currently hinges on future developments in intensional logics. -michael