[Serious Phil] Get off the fence, Stu.

[larry_tapper]

I can't resist a note on this interminable argument about just how stupid the Chinese Room is, as described by Searle. Yeah, I shouldn't be doing this, I know, but my lame excuse is that there are readers here who haven't seen all this before.  

Wikipedia sez:

"Chinese room as a Turing machine...
 
"The Chinese room has a design analogous to that of a modern computer. It has a Von Neumann architecture, which consists of a program (the book of instructions), some memory (the papers and file cabinets), a CPU which follows the instructions (the man), and a means to write symbols in memory (the pencil and eraser). A machine with this design is known in theoretical computer science as "Turing complete", because it has the necessary machinery to carry out any computation that a Turing machine can do, and therefore it is capable of doing a step-by-step simulation of any other digital machine, given enough memory and time. Alan Turing writes, "all digital computers are in a sense equivalent."[37] In other words, the Chinese room can do whatever any other digital computer can do (albeit much, much more slowly). The widely accepted Church-Turing thesis holds that any function computable by an effective procedure is computable by a Turing machine.
 
"There are some critics, such as Hanoch Ben-Yami, who argue that the Chinese room can not simulate all the abilities of a digital computer.[38]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

So, unless someone here has boned up on the fine points of Hanoch Ben-Yami's dissenting view, we may take it that the Chinese Room as described by Searle can in principle do anything a TM can do, which is not exactly chopped liver, because Watson the Jeopardy champion is a TM as far as I know. 

Peter Brawley's remark that we can hardly expect a bicycle to fly strikes SWM as a keen insight, for reasons that have long escaped me. But PB has also written (in Analytic) that the CR is much simpler in design than a TM. So either Wikipedia or PB is mistaken about this. I report, you decide.

LT  




--- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <Philscimind at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "Peter D" <Philscimind@> wrote:
>  
> > --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <Philscimind@> wrote:
> > >
> > > --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "Peter D" <Philscimind@> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <Philscimind@> wrote:
> > > > > That the Chinese Room (a device built to respond to questions in Chinese through clever ideogram matching) doesn't, in fact, understand what it is responding to, should be no more surprising than that device built to operate like a bicycle doesn't fly like an airplane. In other words, as Dennett puts it in Consciousness Explained, "complexity matters."
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > Brawley's response would be decisive, not merely interesting, if Searle had ever made it clear that the CR was only specified
> > > > to perform simple-minded look up operations on a huge database.
> > > > He did not make that clear.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > He did 
> > 
> > Cite him.
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> I have done so on the other list and WE HAVE discussed it. Of course you denied that the text I reproduced and linked to meant what I said it meant and so we had another one of those endless debates about that.
> 
> But the bottom line was that Searle specked the CR and he specked it explicitly to do certain things and the specs are found in the system he describes which is available in various iterations (even on-line) in Searle's own words.
> 
> That YOU can say he didn't explicitly exclude adding more to the system is irrelevant because HE DIDN'T INCLUDE MORE which is the point i.e., it is precisely the stuff he leaves out that is said to make the difference in a model like Dennett's. So the question becomes who is right, would adding those extra operations make the difference?
> 
> THE ANSWER TO THAT DEPENDS ON WHAT WE THINK CONSCIOUSNESS IS WHICH IS WHAT THIS DEBATE ALWAYS COMES BACK TO.
> 
> Dennett proposes that consciousness can be understood as a particular kind of information processing system while Searle says it can't because the individual processes that combine to make up the system AND DON'T MAKE ANYTHING CONSCIOUS IN SEARLE'S CR. But THAT is not what is being disputed. I have NEVER claimed the CR shows consciousness (or understanding, which is the proxy for consciousness in THAT argument). I have always pointed out that the Dennettian model, while it is constructed of the same kinds of constituents as the CR, is different BECAUSE it does more, contains more processes doing more things in a different way, etc., etc. 
> 
> In other words, Dennett's response to the CRA is that "complexity matters". Put it in, says Dennett, and the CR no longer poses a problem because. As Brawley put it a while back: it's like building a bicycle and then wondering why it doesn't take off from the runway.
> 
> And, as I have often noted in these discussions, the only reason to think that the CR's failure to do what brains manifestly do is evidence against the possibility of consciousness occurring in any system having the same constituent elements as the CR is to suppose that what you're looking for in the CR must be there at the constituent level, must be discernible as a part of the device somewhere within it for the CR to understand.
> 
> BUT THE ONLY REASON TO THINK THAT IS AN INABILITY TO SEE CONSCIOUSNESS AS A COMBINATION OF OTHER THINGS WHICH ARE NOT THEMSELVES CONSCIOUS. And that is the dualist presumption BECAUSE IT AMOUNTS TO EXPECTING CONSCIOUSNESS TO BE AN ONTOLOGICAL BASIC, SOMETHING THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO ANYTHING OTHER THAN ITSELF.
> 
> 
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