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

Thinking Machines 95in the thought experiment, we falsely conclude that rapid waves cannotbe light, either. Similarly, Searle has slowed down the mental computationto a range in which we humans no longer think of it as understanding(since understanding is ordinarily much faster). By trusting ourintuitions in the thought experiment, we falsely conclude that rapidcomputation cannot be understanding, either. But if a speeded-up versionof Searle's preposterous story could come true, and we met a personwho seemed to converse intelligently in Chinese but was really deployingmillions of memorized rules in fractions of a second, it is not so clear thatwe would deny that he understood Chinese.My own view is that Searle is merely exploring facts about the Englishword understand. People are reluctant to use the word unless certainstereotypical conditions apply: the rules of the language are used rapidlyand unconsciously, and the content of the language is connected to thebeliefs of the whole person. If people balk at using the vernacular wordunderstand to embrace exotic conditions that violate the stereotype butpreserve the essence of the phenomenon, then nothing, scientificallyspeaking, is really at stake. We can look for another word, or agree to usethe old one in a technical sense; who cares? The explanation of whatmakes understanding work is the same. Science, after all, is about theprinciples that make things work, not which things are "really" examplesof a familiar word. If a scientist explains the functioning of the humanelbow by saying it is a second-class lever, it is no refutation to describe aguy holding a second-class lever made of steel and proclaim, "But look,the guy doesn't have three elhows\\\"As for the "physical-chemical properties" of the brain, I have alreadymentioned the problem: brain tumors, the brains of mice, and neural tissuekept alive in a dish don't understand, but their physical-chemicalproperties are the same as the ones of our brains. The computationaltheory explains the difference: those hunks of neural tissue are notarranged into patterns of connectivity that carry out the right kind ofinformation processing. For example, they do not have parts that distinguishnouns from verbs, and their activity patterns do not carry out therules of syntax, semantics, and common sense. Of course, we can alwayscall that a difference in physical-chemical properties (in the same sensethat two books differ in their physical-chemical properties), but then theterm is meaningless because it can no longer be defined in the languageof physics and chemistry.With thought experiments, turnabout is fair play. Perhaps the ulti-