On 26/10/2007, Allen Majorovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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?
Searle would probably say that the person who sets up the Chinese Room has to understand Chinese, but the person in the room does not. This is true, but as has been pointed out previously, it is possible for the system to understand Chinese while the individual components of the system do not. Individual neurons in a Chinese speaker's brain understand even less of the process they participate in than the person in the Chinese Room does, yet the brain as a whole understands Chinese. -- Stathis Papaioannou ----- 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=57829247-7a6e38
