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C00002 00002 In trying to refute the "Berkeley answer", John Searle
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In trying to refute the "Berkeley answer", John Searle
imagines a man carrying out in his head a program for conducting
a dialog in Chinese and notes that the man carrying out the
program might understand no Chinese. He concludes from this
that understanding is not a property of programs.
Here two processes are using the same hardware. It is like
Stevenson's %2Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde%1 except that Dr. Jekyll is
interpreting Mr. Hyde rather than time-sharing with him. Were either
phenomenon common, we would not identify a human personality with the
human body just as we don't identify a computer program with the computer
itself. Once we distinguish the two processes taking place in the same
brain, the Berkeley answer that the interpreted process understands
Chinese remains tenable.