>The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the

>The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the symbols it is given (hence the whole idea of an effective method). But the symbols aren't the interesting piece of a sequence of computation, but rather the structure being instantiated. There is a map/territory ambiguity here. The symbols are just placeholders into an abstract structure that describes the dynamics of some system. When the structure is reified, i.e. made actual by being implemented in a system, then it is the structure that has causal efficacy in the world and it is that which we interact with. Dismissing the idea of an implemented program understanding Chinese because "the program doesn't understand the symbols" is confusing the map for the territory. >Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs. I totally disagree. If I have a program that inverts an arbitrary matrix, this is not a function I project onto the program. This function is intrinsic to the sequence of operations it carries out. An intelligent alien studying the operation of the program would be able to figure out its function given enough time and effort. >The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element. The CPU is performing syntactic translation, but the structure being implemented is an existing thing beyond CPU operations. And this is the misdirection in the Chinese room argument. To ask if the man understands Chinese is just to ask the wrong question.