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I thought the idea was that because the only part of the room actually doing things (the person), doesn't understand chinese? I mean, agree with it or not, but

• chubot 11y ago
  Yeah but it just makes me more confused? How does that say anything about a computer then? There's no human being who doesn't understand something inside a computer.
  • drdeca 11y ago
    The idea is, roughly, if a person in the place of the cpu does not understand chinese, then the cpu doesn't understand chinese. And because the cpu is the part that does stuff, like the person, then if the system w/ the person doesn't understand chinese, then the computer w/ the cpu doesn't understand chinese. Because there's nothing to make the cpu more understand-y, only things to make it less understand-y, and otherwise the systems are the same.
• Chathamization 11y ago
  Yeah, but the system would be the person + the lookup tables, not just the person. The problem is, we don't tend to say "does a room with a person in it and several books have this knowledge?" Relying on a system that doesn't tend to get grouped together (there's no term for the system human + book inside room), and having only one animate object (so that people think of the animate object as the system instead of the animate and inanimate objects), as well as asking the question only about the animate part of the system, all seem to suggest that the purpose of the thought experiment is to mislead people. A better example would be saying something like - does this company have the knowledge to make a particular product? We can say that no individual member of the company does, but the company as a whole does.
  • drdeca 11y ago
    I think this is called the "systems response". Which, well there's a whole series of responses back and forth, with different ideas about what is or is not a good response. One idea describes a machine where each state of the program is pre-computed, and the computer steps through the states one by one, but in each state, if the next of the pre-computed states was wrong (i.e. would not be the next step of the program, following from the current state), if (e.g.) a switch was flipped, it would cause the program to be computed correctly despite the pre-computed states being wrong, and if the switch is not flipped, then it would continue along the pre-computer states. If the switch is flipped on, or if its flipped off, and all the pre-computer states are correct, the same things happen, and it does not interact with the switch at all. If all the pre-computed states are nonsense, and the switch is flipped on, then it runs the program correctly, despite the pre-computed states being nonsense. So, suppose that if the pre-computed states are all wrong, and the switch is on, that that counts as conscious. Then, if the pre-computed states are all correct, and the switch is on, would that still be conscious? What if almost all the pre-computed states were wrong, but a few were right? It doesn't seem like there is an obvious cutoff point between "all the pre-computed steps are wrong" and "all the pre-computer steps are right", where there would be a switch between what is conscious. So then, one might conclude that the one where all the pre-computed steps are right, and the switch is on, is just as conscious as the one which has the switch on but all the pre-computed states are wrong. But then what of the one where all the pre-computed states are right, and the switch is off? The switch does not interact with the rest of the stuff unless a pre-computed next step would be wrong, so how could it be that when the switch is on, the one with all the pre-computations is conscious, but when it is off, it isn't? But the one with all the pre-computations correct, and the switch off, is not particularly different from just reading the list of states in a book. If one grants consciousness to that, why not grant it to e.g. fictional characters that "communicate with" the reader? One might come up with some sort of thing like, it depends on how it interacts with the world, and it doesn't make sense for it to have pre-computed steps if it is interacting with the world in new ways, that might be a way out. Or one could argue that it really does matter if the switch is flipped one way or the other, and when you flip it back and forth it switches between being actually conscious and being, basically, a p-zombie. And speaking of which you could say, "well what if the same thing is done with brain states being pre-computed?", etc. etc. I think the Chinese Room problem, while not conclusive, is a useful introduction to these issues?
• deepnet 11y ago
  The person in the room performing the lookup is a red-herring and can be replaced by suitable algorithm, e.g. a convnet - which could learn the lookup task. Consciousness resides in the minds that created the lookup tables: they were constructed by conscious beings to map queries to meaningful responses. The lookup tables are the very sophisticated part of Searle's Chinese Room. The recent emergent semantic vector algebra discovered in human languages by Mikolov's word2vec [Mikolov et al] demonstrate that some of the computational power of language is inherent in the language ( but only meaningfully interpretable by a conscious listener. Meaning requires Consciousness but language is unexpectedly sophisticated and contains a semantic vector space which can answer simple queries ("What is the Capital of...") and analogise ("King is to What as Man is to Woman") algebraicly. [Mikolov et al] This inherent semantic vector space is discoverable by context encoding large corpii. Language is a very sophisticated and ancient tool that allows some reasoning to be performed by simple algebraic transformations inherent to the language. - [Mikolov et al] : Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781 http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781 & https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/ https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/