On 13 Sep 2012, at 22:08, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, September 13, 2012 3:58:21 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]>
wrote:
> This is the symbol grounding problem pointed out by Searle's
Chinese Room
I've said it before I'll say it again, Searle's Chinese Room is the
single stupidest thought experiment ever devised by the mind of man.
Of course even the best of us can have a brain fart from time to
time, but Searle baked this turd pie decades ago and apparently he
still thinks its quite clever, and thus I can only conclude that
John Searle is as dumb as his room.
The only way that you can think that it's stupid is if you don't
understand it. It's the same thing as Leibniz Mill. His particulars
may be a bit more elaborate than they need to be, but the point he
makes is the same that has been made before by many others: The map
is not the territory. The menu is not the meal.
To my mind, the fact that you have particular animus toward the
Chinese Room can only be because on some level you know that it is a
relatively simple way of proving something that you are in deep
denial about. Why else would it bother you in particular? Are there
other philosophical arguments that bother you like this?
I am with Clark on this, Craig. Searle either begs the question or
confuses a program with the machine running the program. Dennett and
Hofstadter explains this already very well in "Mind's I".
It is the same error as believing that RA can think like PA when
emulating PA. But when RA emulates PA, it is like when I emulate
another program, or Einstein's brain, I don't become that other
program, nor do I become Einstein, in such case. It is again a
confusion of level.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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