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May 26

Themes from John Searle

1. Time-sharing and interpulation

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, interpulation 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.