Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

94 J HOW THE MIND WORKSSearle says that what the program is missing is intentionality, the connectionbetween a symbol and what it means. Many people have interpretedhim as saying that the program is missing consciousness, andindeed Searle believes that consciousness and intentionality are closelyrelated because we are conscious of what we mean when we have athought or use a word. Intentionality, consciousness, and other mentalphenomena are caused not by information processing, Searle concludes,but by the "actual physical-chemical properties of actual human brains"(though he never says what those properties are).The Chinese Room has kicked off a truly unbelievable amount ofcommentary. More than a hundred published articles have replied to it,and I have found it an excellent reason to take my name off all Internetdiscussion-group lists. To people who say that the whole room (man plusrule sheet) understands Chinese, Searle replies: Fine, let the guy memorizethe rules, do the calculations in his head, and work outdoors. Theroom is gone, and our symbol-manipulator still does not understand Chinese.To those who say the man lacks any sensorimotor connection tothe world, and that is the crucial missing factor, Searle replies: Supposethat the incoming squiggles are the outputs of a television camera andthe outgoing squoggles are the commands to a robot arm. He has theconnections, but he still doesn't speak the language. To those who say hisprogram does not mirror what the brain does, Searle can invoke Block'sparallel distributed counterpart to the Chinese Room, the Chinese Gym:millions of people in a huge gym act as if they are neurons and shout signalsto each other over walkie-talkies, duplicating a neural network thatanswers questions about stories in Chinese. But the gym does not understandChinese any more than the guy did.Searle's tactic is to appeal over and over to our common sense. Youcan almost hear him saying, "Aw, c'mon! You mean to claim that the guyunderstands Chinese?'?!!! Geddadahere! He doesn't understand a word!!He's lived in Brooklyn all his life!!" and so on. But the history of sciencehas not been kind to the simple intuitions of common sense, to put itmildly. The philosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland ask us to imaginehow Searle's argument might have been used against Maxwell's theorythat light consists of electromagnetic waves. A guy holds a magnet in hishand and waves it up and down. The guy is creating electromagneticradiation, but no light comes out; therefore, light is not an electromagneticwave. The thought experiment slows down the waves to a range inwhich we humans no longer see them as light. By trusting our intuitions