Asymmetrical Information

Searle's Chinese Room is the biggest crock of philosophical shit.

First off, the idea of "looking up the answer" in a book for language translation is ridiculous. To understand language requires history. "It's a bear" means one thing when the preceding sentence is "How are you doing on the problem?" as opposed to "What's that animal?".

But ignore that. Let's add into the room enough paper so that the person can make notes as demanded by the book. What then? Does he speak Chinese?

No, of course not. No more than a Pentium IV can be said to be a flight simulator. The system as a whole - the person plus the lookup table plus the memory - speaks Chinese. The person does not. Similarly Pentium IVs are not flight simulators. The combination of a P4 with memory, motherboard, etc, and a the right software - that's a flight simulator. The parts are not the whole. (Duh.)

Searle wants to then ask if he memorized the book (thus internalizing all the parts of the system in his brain), does he speak Chinese? Well, yes, of course - he can still (mechanically) "speak" it as before. But this does not mean he speaks it as he does other languages. The software is running at two different levels.

Kind of offtopic but the Searle thing always burns me when it is taken at all seriously, which it strangely is.

He makes a pretty strong case for why the "you must accept evolution to be a competent doctor" argument doesn't hold much water. And given that he apparently does not support the Creationist viewpoint...

That said, Dini is free to recommend -- or not recommend -- whomever he chooses. OTOH if the school is requiring a recommendation that, for some students, only he can write...well, it's gone beyond a personal privilege issue and Dini would then become a highly preferencial gatekeeper, which doesn't seem so good either.

Murtaugh brings up a pretty good point and one that is pretty unfriendly to Dini's requirements. It seems to be easy to punch holes in the Chinese room if you assume perfect knowldege of what is going on inside it, but the question is what does the observer to whom the room is a 'black box' think?

Dini has know way of knowing what is going on inside the head of a student asking for a letter of recommendation. So long as the student regurgitates the expected responses to his questions (like the responses generated by the man in the Chinese room), he has no way to verify that the person actually believes what he is saying, rather than simply recites learned answers.

Dini's requirement discriminates primarily against people whose moral values prevent them from dishonestly claiming belief in principles that they doubt, even if they understand them.

The Dini problem is not with Dini himself. Any academic is going to have his own axe to grind and woe to the fellow between the edge and the stone. Where the university screwed up is in only have one prof to do all the vetting of advanced bio grad school applicants. That was a prescription for subjective recommendations without even getting Dini's anticlericalism into the equation.

Leonard is right about the Chinese Room. Chris, a blackbox "biology room" would respond to the question Dini asks in a way that Dini would approve.
The whole point of the turing test is that you can not restrict the questions it must answer. It is quite simple to fool many people with current turing machines if they do not know the right questions to ask. Dini is seperating those that really understand biology from those that do not by asking one of those questions.
So, strictly on the turing test analogy level, Murtaugh's reasoning fals apart. I would submit that this is not really a good analogy anyway.
I personally like the idea of trying to find data points about the quality of doctors, all other things being equal, of those that believe in Natural Selection, and those that do not. I would argue that if there is *any* evidence that they perform less well, that would be justification, as the future of medicine will likely be more reliant on concepts of evolutionary biolgy such as genetics.
But I am suprised that libertarian-leaning folks would consider forcing a man to write a letter of recommendation for someone he considers unqualified.

Jane pointed this out on the previous thread about Dini, but it bears repeating since a certain bit of misinformation keeps getting repeated. Creationists do not deny natural selection. Furthermore, many (if not most) creationists do not insist on literal 24-hour Genesis days or that the universe is only 6,000 years old.

Yes, there are some fringe groups out there that believe such things, and I (a chemist who happens to believe in a creator God) will be the first to say they don't belong in science. But for the strident pro-Darwinists out there to paint all "creationists" with the same broad brush reflects either ignorance or demagoguery. And it is unfortunate that many non-scientific bloggers have been duped into promulgating that myth.

"Creationists do not deny natural selection"
- Eric Seymour

Well, then what are we talking about? A person who does not deny natural selection would have no trouble answering the question honestly. Certainly, as you suggest, there are some that do, and it seems to be that you are agreeing with Dini that "they don't belong in science."

Also, I am curious as to where this "bit of misinformation keeps getting repeated". On this thread?

Eric:

As I recall, Dini's question specifically asks students how they account for "human origins." If a student's answer involves evolution by natural selection, from some primate ancestor, it sounds as if Dini would be satisfied.

So, that wouldn't exclude the type of creationists you describe, who believe a supreme being set everything in motion multiple billion years ago, and allowed natural selection to do the subsequent work.

Qetzal: What I've not read is whether Dini would refuse to recommend anyone who suggested that a Creator has had an "influence" (however defined) on how that natural selection worked. In other words, is there a God that acts like the "house" in a casino? Scientifically that would be hard to prove, in fact impossible, so a strict constructionist would condemn such a belief in what cannot be phenomenologically observed.

Which brings up all sorts of questions about the role of free will in belief and faith, but again Dini might mechanically deny that there is any choice to be made if a divine alternative to strict Evolutionism cannot be discretely hypothecated.

Well, then what are we talking about? A person who does not deny natural selection would have no trouble answering the question honestly.

Natural selection explains subtle changes in species to adapt to their environment (e.g. finch beaks, bacterial strains, the human appendix), and this has been clearly observed. It takes a certain amount of "faith" to extrapolate this to mean that all species evolved from an original unicellular organism, which in turn came from a soup of chemicals.

Therefore, scientists like myself believe that the only way macroevolution could have happened is by divine intervention .

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