[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

Ben Zaiboc bbenzai at yahoo.com
Fri Feb 19 14:31:44 UTC 2010


Gordon wrote:

> Too bad our man in the room has no understanding of any 
> symbols and so no knowledge 
> base to build on. He can do no more than follow the 
> syntactic instructions in the program: 
> if input = "squiggle" then output "squoogle".


'if input = "squiggle" then output "squoogle"' cannot answer random questions on any given topic in a meaningful way.  To do that requires understanding of the topic.  The man is irrelevant, either your CR understands chinese or it doesn't produce any comprehensible output, and the whole argument is invalid.  There is no way it can give satisfactory answers to any questions put to it without actually understanding both the language and the subject (and the questions).  

If you dispute this, then all you need to do is produce a giant look-up table that can sensibly answer any possible questions on 'The Magnificent Seven', and you'll have proven your point, and we can then take the CRA, and your conclusions from it, seriously.

Ben Zaiboc


      



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