psychology cog

Cog. Psych WWR #1

In class last week the Chinese Room argument was brought up in reference to how symbols are grounded. I had never heard of the Chinese Room or John Searle so I wrote it down to investigate after class. Further into the discussion the analogy of trying to discern symbols with more symbols struck an immediate cord with me. My six year old daughter had recently finished reading a beginners chapter book on Helen Keller and in the story it tells of this momentous moment where Helen finally understood that the hand movements she was making equated to a symbol for the water she was feeling. In the book Helen poignantly describes this as her soul’s birthday. My little one had a lot of questions about what that meant and I fumblingly try to convey the meaning. Finally I asked her to close her eyes and cover her ears tight while I made movements in her hand. I think in some small way she was able to appreciate what it would be like to have communicate that way.

In an effort to try and learn more about that moment I pursued more information about the Chinese Room and Helen Keller. Indeed I found an article published in Minds & Machines in 2006 titled “How Helen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room” by William J. Rapaport. He posits that computers can learn natural language through syntax semantics which he says is how Helen Keller came to know language. In a dictionary analogy Rapaport clearly identifies the circular process of defining word with another. At some point you must have understanding or meaning of a word to get out of this loop. He calls this a closed loop. Our minds work in much the same way per Rapport “More significantly, our brain is just such a closed system: all information that we get from the external world, along with all of our thoughts, concepts, etc., is represented in a single system of neuron firings. Any description of that real neural network, by itself, is a purely syntactic one” (Rapport, 2006).

Ultimately, Rapport explains that Helen had some semantic correspondence because she had her own rudimentary version of signs and ways of communication before her teacher Ann Sullivan arrived. While this article certainly helped me to understand how it was Helen was able to make such an extraordinary leap in understand I was not able to see how this could be applied to computers. That

could be due to my own lack of understanding rather than fault in the author’s logic. There is another article out there titled Helen Keller was not in a Chinese Room. I intend to read that as well to see if I can get anything further of the subject