Pardon me for butting in and apologies if I've missed some crucial point or complex idea but having dug up a synopsis of John Searles argument:
"A man is in a room with a book of rules. Chinese sentences are passed under the door to him. The man looks up in his book of rules how to process the sentences. Eventually the rules tell him to copy some Chinese characters onto paper and pass the resulting Chinese sentences as a reply to the message he has received. The dialog continues." "To follow these rules the man need not understand Chinese." "Searle concludes from this that a computer program carrying out the rules doesn't understand Chinese either, and therefore no computer program can understand anything. He goes on to argue about biology being necessary for understanding." (http://kairosnews.org/john-searles-chinese-room-argument) It seems to me that Mr. Searles is suggesting that because some people (intelligences) are cooks, i.e. work from a set of rules they don't understand, this somehow proves that chemists, i.e. people who *do* understand the set of rules, don't, or can't, exist. If the guy with the book of rules in his lap doesn't have to understand Chinese to do the translations, does the guy who wrote the book of rules have to under Chinese in order to write it? Allen __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.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=57816188-f9263b
