Most of the self-appointed internet philosophers lack both of these qualities: What use is attacking the man here?
You are also misrepresenting Searle's argument. In the case of addition, the machine would not only be able to perform it, but also answer any conceivable question that regards the abstract operation of addition. It would be able to do everything a human would do, excluding nothing. The underlying argument is that "understanding" is a fundamentally and exclusively human property (this will not be fully rebutted until we discover in full the processes underlying learning and memory in humans)
Granted, a huge list of syntactic rules will probably not result to any useful intelligence, but a brain simulator would be exactly equivalent to a human (and Searle's response to that argument is completely unfounded)
I don't think I misrepresent his argument. I just interpret it using different examples. He uses a huge example, like speaking Chinese, which seems to confuse a lot of people. I use something much simpler, like doing addition.
His argument is based on the notion that doing something and understanding what you do are two different things. I don't see why this needs an elaborate thought-experiment when we all have experienced doing things without understanding them. We don't need to compare humans to computers to see the difference.
Problem is, this difference becomes apparent only when you go beyond the scope of the original activity/algorithm. And that's exactly where modern AI programs fail, badly. You take a sophisticated algorithm that does wonders in one domain, throw it into a vastly different domain, and it starts to fail, miserably, even though that second domain might be very simple.
His argument is that, while a human can do something with or without understanding it (e.g Memorizing), a machine can only do the former and will never do the latter. The argument may hold for the currect (simplistic) AI, but not for a future full brain simulator.
You are also misrepresenting Searle's argument. In the case of addition, the machine would not only be able to perform it, but also answer any conceivable question that regards the abstract operation of addition. It would be able to do everything a human would do, excluding nothing. The underlying argument is that "understanding" is a fundamentally and exclusively human property (this will not be fully rebutted until we discover in full the processes underlying learning and memory in humans)
Granted, a huge list of syntactic rules will probably not result to any useful intelligence, but a brain simulator would be exactly equivalent to a human (and Searle's response to that argument is completely unfounded)