On 10/25/07, candice schuster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >I think what Searle was trying to get at was > this...and I have read 'The Chinese Room Theory'...I think that what he was > trying to say was...if the human brain breaks down code like a machine does, > that does not make it understand the logic of the code, it is afterall code. > If you go back to basics, for example binary code, it becomes almost > sequence and you are (well some of us are, like machines) able to understand > how to put the puzzle together again but we may not understand the logic > behind that code, ie: The Chinese Language as a whole.
I think that the easiest way to refute the Chinese Room is this: instead of having a man in a room manipulating Chinese letters, replace all the neurons in a brain with men. Each of these men receives messages from the others and sends them onwards according to certain rules, in exactly the same way as neurons in a brain would. None of them really understand what they are doing, just like no individual neuron in the brain understands anything. By Searle's reasoning, this would prove that human brains cannot be intelligent! Of course, at least in his original paper, Searle tries to avoid this conclusion by claiming that the human brain is different-in-kind from any other physical process. Only problem being, he never says why this would be so, and he goes as far as claiming that a system which was fully computationally equivalent to a human brain would not be intelligent, simply by virtue of not being a human brain. That's how it is because, uhh, because Searle says so. (Admittedly, I have only read the original article about the Chinese Room, so he might have built upon his argument afterwards... but I've had the impression that it isn't really so.) -- http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tspro1/ | http://xuenay.livejournal.com/ Organizations worth your time: http://www.singinst.org/ | http://www.crnano.org/ | http://lifeboat.com/ ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=57691956-32ab1f
