>I dont think the "systems reply" actually deals with this point To be clear, the point of the systems reply isn't to demonstrate how a computational system ca

>I dont think the "systems reply" actually deals with this point To be clear, the point of the systems reply isn't to demonstrate how a computational system can understand language, it is to point out a loophole such that computationalism avoids the main thrust of the Chinese room. >If using a language isnt equivalent to a finite computable function -- what is it? In the Chinese room, the man isn't an embodiment of the computable function (algorithm). The man is simply the computational engine of the algorithm. The embodied algorithm includes the state of the "tape", the unbounded stack of paper as "scratch space" used by the man in carrying out the instructions of the algorithm. So it remains an open question whether the finite computable function that implements the language function must "use language" in the relevant sense. What reason is there to think that it does use language in the relevant sense? For one, a semantic view of the dynamics of the algorithm as it processes the symbols has predictive power for the output of the system. Such predictive power must be explained. If we assume that the room can in principle respond meaningfully and substantively to any meaningful Chinese input, we can go as far as to say the room is computing over the semantic space of the Chinese language embedded in some environment context encoded in its dictionary. This is because, in the limit of substantive Chinese output for all input, there is no way to duplicate the output without duplicating the structure, in this case semantic structure. The algorithm, in a very straightforward sense, is using language to determine appropriate responses.