The Chinese Room shows that it’s possible for a convincing simulation to appear to us as having understanding, while in reality not having understanding.
You still did not show the difference between a “convincing simulation of understanding” and the “real understanding”. Can you provide an epistemological method which will separate the “goats” from the “sheep”? If you cannot, then the distinction is meaningless.
The whole point of the experiment is to show that even if something looks like a duck and acts like a duck, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a duck.
So what
IS it? Is it a “tiger”? But the aim of the duck principle shows this: “if it looks like (etc)… a duck”, and you have no way to tell that it just “looks like” a duck, then it is irrational to assume that it is
NOT a duck.
To be precise: “the distinction between the real thing and a simulation thereof is meaningless if there is no epistemological method to tell the difference”. Because “epistemology” is THE key. (Something that you mistakenly to call “scientism”.)
I did. Intentionality is the ‘aboutness’ of thoughts.
And what is this “aboutness”? It is just another way of talking about
abstractions. The word “cat” does not have a meaning of its own,
we assign a meaning to it. If you try to use it in a conversation with someone who does not speak English, all you will get is an empty look, and grunt: “huh??”
And what is that meaning? It is a neural configuration which reflects an “abstract cat”. There is another way to express it: “the meaning of the word is the collection of all the written and unwritten rules which describe the proper circumstances it can be used - so that the other person will have the same abstract concept in their mind.” This is a constructive definition. Your “abstract cat” - the neural configuration is different from mine. So how do we know that we talk about the same thing? We compare the propositions, and eventually we can discern if your usage of “cat” is meaningful to me.
The best way to talk about it is an experiment. Take two people, one speaks English, the other one speaks German. How can you start a conversation? How do you teach the language? Pretty simple. You actually present a physical “cat” and say the word “cat”. The other guy will repeat “cat”, and says “Katze”. Now at this moment you learned the meaning of the previously meaningless word: “Katze” and he learned the previously meaningless word: “cat”. This is how the previously meaningless gobbledygook of vowels and consonants
GAIN meaning.
