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May 26

Themes from John Searle

1. Time-sharing and interpretation

2. Political movements and other memes as programs in the societal computer.

3. Artificial speech acts

4. The strong AI hypothesis and ascribing mental qualities to machines

5. Contingent identifications as an example of ambiguity tolerance.

Time-sharing, interpretation and variants of the ``Chinese room.''
Searle's ``Chinese room'' hypothesizes a man in a room equipped with a
book of rules for manipulating Chinese sentences and conducting a Chinese
conversation by using the rules to reply in Chinese to Chinese sentences
passed into the room on paper. Searle asks if we would then say that the
man necessarily understands Chinese. Nothing that the man might not
understand Chinese in any usual sense, Searle concludes that a computer
obeying rules doesn't know anything either, e.g. doesn't understand
Chinese.

Searle rejects the proposal that it's the system consisting of the man and
the rule book that understands Chinese, pointing out that the man might
have the rules in his memory, still without understanding Chinese in any
ordinary sense.

Even in some weakened sense of AI one still wants to say that specific
programs can do X rather than say that the machine can do X.