Richard Feynman musing on beauty
I have a friend who's an artist, and he has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say,'Look how beautiful it is,' and I'll agree. And he says,'You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.' And I think he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is. I can appreciate the beauty of a flower, and at the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. It's not just beauty at this dimension, the inner structure.. also the processes. the fact that the colours in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a queation - does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Or why is it aesthetic? There are all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.
The Chinese Room Thought Experiment
By John Searle
Imagine that you carry out the steps in a program for answering questions in a language you do not understand. I do not understand Chinese, so I imagine that I am locked in a room with a lot of boxes of Chinese symbols (the database), I get small bunches of Chinese symbols passed to me (questions in Chinese), and I look up in a rule book (the program) what I am supposed to do. I perform certain operations on the symbols in accordance with the rules (that is, I carry out the steps in the program) and give back small bunches of symbols (answers to the questions) to those outside the room. I am the computer implementing a program for answering questions in Chinese, but all the same I do not understand a word of Chinese. And this is the point: if I do not understand Chinese solely on the basis of implementing a computer program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis, because no digital computer has anything I do not have.
This is such a simple and decisive argument that I am embarrassed to have to repeat it, but in the years since I first published it there must have been over a hundred published attacks on it, including some in Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained....The Chinese Room Argument—as it has come to be called—has a simple three-step structure:
Programs are entirely syntactical.
Minds have a semantics.
Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient for, semantics.
Therefore programs are not minds. Q.E.D.
