Saturday, May 26, 2007

A guy who speaks chinese

Searle's response to the Systems Reply is simple: in principle, the man can internalize the entire system, memorizing all the instructions, doing all the calculations in his head. He could then leave the room and wander outdoors, perhaps even conversing in Chinese. But he still would have no way to attach "any meaning to the formal symbols". The man would now be the entire system, yet he still would not understand Chinese. For example, he would not know the meaning of the Chinese word for hamburger.

(The Chinese Room Argument on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by "host" software (a control program), which creates a simulated computer environment (a virtual machine) for its "guest" software. The "guest" software, which is often itself a complete operating system, runs just as if it were installed on a stand-alone hardware platform. [...] For the "guest" system to function, the simulation must be robust enough to support all the guest system's external interfaces, which (depending on the type of virtualization) may include hardware drivers.

(Wikipedia entry for Virtualization)

The "external interfaces" for the guy who speaks chinese would be his sensory organs (input) and his mouth and extremities (output). It would be nice if there were upgradeable drivers for our central nervous system; I'm a clumsy person with poor reflexes.

Cole (1991) offers an additional argument that the mind doing the understanding is neither the mind of the room operator nor the system consisting of the operator and the program: running a suitably structured computer program might produce answers submitted in Chinese and also answers to questions submitted in Korean. Yet the Chinese answers might apparently display completely different knowledge and memories, beliefs and desires than the answers to the Korean questions — along with a denial that the Chinese answerer knows any Korean, and vice versa. Thus the evidence would be that there were two non-identical minds (one understanding Chinese only, and one understanding Korean only).

(The Chinese Room Argument on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Typically, many such virtual machines are simulated on a given physical machine.

(Wikipedia entry for Virtualization)

Multiple Operating Systems running in a single machine as a (useful!) form of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

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