“Suspicious objects found throughout Boston area” reads the Boston.com headline. And who, pray tell, is stalking the good and mostly uncultured people of Boston? Why it’s Igniognot and Err! Apparently (although I can’t confirm this) the bomb squad even decided to detonated an LCD likeness of our friendly mooninite friends. So let’s see… what’s the moral of the story? Oh yeah! Their might cannot be usurped, fools! On the moon, nerds get their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks.

Galbraith, John Kenneth The Culture of Contentment Houghton Mifflin: Boston, MA

This post is part of Banapana’s running bibliography.

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Haugeland, John (Editor) Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence The MIT Press: Boston, MA

Searle’s Chinese Room

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

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