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I don't understand why people are willing to even accept the premise. The system as described (a book of instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols) can't us

I don't understand why people are willing to even accept the premise. The system as described (a book of instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols) can't usefully answer the question "what time is it?"; why should I believe it could carry on a lucid-but-very-slow conversation in Chinese? Imagine that also in the room is a triangle with four sides. Now the Chinese Room Argument disproves AI and geometry! What subject do you want to demolish next?

neilk 17y ago
I think this is the only real objection to Searle. People get handwavey in these thought experiments, that we can just assume that such a system can be built. Well, no, we can't, not even in theory. It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet. There is an analogy here with Chomsky's linguistics. You can disagree with the specifics of his theory, but he did show that there was no way that people were learning sentences like parrots and repeating them. There had to be some computational / grammatical process. Anybody can imagine mechanical alternatives for doing any information processing. To an extent, that drives the whole of the programming industry. The whole question of intelligence is that we can do it with a few pounds of biological material. Anything that doesn't address this is missing the point.
- afterz 17y ago
  " It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet." I don't believe it, can you show it?
  - DougBTX 17y ago
    Since you could fit someone who speaks Chinese in the room... assuming people are made of elementary particles.
    - jeffcoat 17y ago
      You've assumed your conclusion there: that the system Searle describes is able to encode information in a way similar to a human Chinese speaker.
    - afterz 17y ago
      I still don't believe you. So the numbers are made up? "15 minutes" -> "entire planet"? How much for 10 minutes? And for 1 minute? Is that obvious too? So you think it's very obvious that it's impossible to build a chatbot that speaks chinese for 15 minutes in a computer like the one I'm using now (even one that claims to be a child for example). And why couldn't we just clone a Chinese person brain and say it's a computer? Why do you think a brain snapshot would require the size of a planet?
      - DougBTX 17y ago
        I still don't believe you. Ah, sorry, the "more elementary particles than the entire planet" claim wasn't made by me. My first comment was too vague, here is another try: Yes, it sounds like a very strange claim, since isn't biological material made from elementary particles, and clearly you could fit someone who speaks Chinese into the room. Obviously that assumes that people are made of elementary particles, but if someone is going to argue that, I'm going to need a better definition of elementary particles to make any progress.
  - neilk 17y ago
    I've read up a little more on the Chinese Room and I retract my argument. I misunderstood the idea. I thought Searle was asserting that a human mind can be simulated by a dumb program that only provided cached responses. It's easy to show there are more than 10e50 possible conversational paths in a 15 minute conversation (even a chess game has that many, and conversation is more complex than chess), and there are only 10e50 atoms on earth. But it seems Searle's real argument was that the man inside the box is performing all the actions of an artificially intelligent computer program, just with pencil and paper. Humans clearly perform such actions with just a few pounds of brain matter. Even if the Chinese Room operator requires continent-wide resources, such difficulties don't address the essence of Searle's argument. He seems to be asserting there's something special about the brain called "intentionality" which is unlike a computer running an algorithm. He might be right, but there seems to be no evidence for such a thing, or any way to prove that an entity which claimed "intentionality" didn't really have it.
- ekiru 17y ago
  What's wrong with the objection that, if you accept that any two universal Turing machines are equivalent in power, Searle's argument amounts to(letting P be "there exists an algorithm A such that any computing system executing A understand Chinese" and Q be "a human simulating a computing system executing the algorithm A understands Chinese") "Suppose P. It's obvious that ¬Q. Since P is equivalent to Q, P leads to a contradiction. Therefore ¬P"? It begs the question. Searle's thought experiment does inspire one of my own. Consider a computer that executes a sorting algorithm(mergesort, for example) on inputs consisting of sequences of number. Does it understand how to sort a sequence of numbers? What if a person uses mergesort manually to sort sequences of numbers? Does this person understand how to sort a sequence of numbers? Is there any fundamental difference between the understanding of a person who uses mergesort to sort sequences of numbers and that of a computer that uses mergesort to sort sequences of numbers?
  - jeffcoat 17y ago
    Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters. It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling that if you were to have a conversation in Chinese by following mechanical instructions from a book, you still wouldn't "really understand" Chinese. All well and good, so far. But there are enormous leaps from the Searle-scenario that's so appealing to your intuition to a machine powerful enough to hold a conversation. As a trivial example, the Chinese room cannot even simulate a Turing machine unless you give the person inside rather a lot of scratch paper. You can keep countering objections like this by adding more stuff to the Room. So to hold a conversation about the weather, we'll need to add some separate input channels to observe the outside world, and to talk about the Room's plans for today, we'll need to throw in something that can keep track of time, .... it just goes on. (And while you're adding all the extra machinery, don't forget that even the original book is incalculably large, not the merely hefty tome that you're picturing in your mind's eye.) As you do this, you get farther and farther away from the original appeal to your intuition. So far that your only hope of making sense is to acknowledge that your intuitions about the simplified situation has absolutely nothing to do with a Chinese Room powerful enough to actually meet the original stipulation, that the room can "pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese".

neilk 17y ago

I think this is the only real objection to Searle. People get handwavey in these thought experiments, that we can just assume that such a system can be built. Well, no, we can't, not even in theory. It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet. There is an analogy here with Chomsky's linguistics. You can disagree with the specifics of his theory, but he did show that there was no way that people were learning sentences like parrots and repeating them. There had to be some computational / grammatical process. Anybody can imagine mechanical alternatives for doing any information processing. To an extent, that drives the whole of the programming industry. The whole question of intelligence is that we can do it with a few pounds of biological material. Anything that doesn't address this is missing the point.

afterz 17y ago
" It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet." I don't believe it, can you show it?
- DougBTX 17y ago
  Since you could fit someone who speaks Chinese in the room... assuming people are made of elementary particles.
  - jeffcoat 17y ago
    You've assumed your conclusion there: that the system Searle describes is able to encode information in a way similar to a human Chinese speaker.
  - afterz 17y ago
    I still don't believe you. So the numbers are made up? "15 minutes" -> "entire planet"? How much for 10 minutes? And for 1 minute? Is that obvious too? So you think it's very obvious that it's impossible to build a chatbot that speaks chinese for 15 minutes in a computer like the one I'm using now (even one that claims to be a child for example). And why couldn't we just clone a Chinese person brain and say it's a computer? Why do you think a brain snapshot would require the size of a planet?
    - DougBTX 17y ago
      I still don't believe you. Ah, sorry, the "more elementary particles than the entire planet" claim wasn't made by me. My first comment was too vague, here is another try: Yes, it sounds like a very strange claim, since isn't biological material made from elementary particles, and clearly you could fit someone who speaks Chinese into the room. Obviously that assumes that people are made of elementary particles, but if someone is going to argue that, I'm going to need a better definition of elementary particles to make any progress.
- neilk 17y ago
  I've read up a little more on the Chinese Room and I retract my argument. I misunderstood the idea. I thought Searle was asserting that a human mind can be simulated by a dumb program that only provided cached responses. It's easy to show there are more than 10e50 possible conversational paths in a 15 minute conversation (even a chess game has that many, and conversation is more complex than chess), and there are only 10e50 atoms on earth. But it seems Searle's real argument was that the man inside the box is performing all the actions of an artificially intelligent computer program, just with pencil and paper. Humans clearly perform such actions with just a few pounds of brain matter. Even if the Chinese Room operator requires continent-wide resources, such difficulties don't address the essence of Searle's argument. He seems to be asserting there's something special about the brain called "intentionality" which is unlike a computer running an algorithm. He might be right, but there seems to be no evidence for such a thing, or any way to prove that an entity which claimed "intentionality" didn't really have it.
ekiru 17y ago
What's wrong with the objection that, if you accept that any two universal Turing machines are equivalent in power, Searle's argument amounts to(letting P be "there exists an algorithm A such that any computing system executing A understand Chinese" and Q be "a human simulating a computing system executing the algorithm A understands Chinese") "Suppose P. It's obvious that ¬Q. Since P is equivalent to Q, P leads to a contradiction. Therefore ¬P"? It begs the question. Searle's thought experiment does inspire one of my own. Consider a computer that executes a sorting algorithm(mergesort, for example) on inputs consisting of sequences of number. Does it understand how to sort a sequence of numbers? What if a person uses mergesort manually to sort sequences of numbers? Does this person understand how to sort a sequence of numbers? Is there any fundamental difference between the understanding of a person who uses mergesort to sort sequences of numbers and that of a computer that uses mergesort to sort sequences of numbers?
- jeffcoat 17y ago
  Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters. It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling that if you were to have a conversation in Chinese by following mechanical instructions from a book, you still wouldn't "really understand" Chinese. All well and good, so far. But there are enormous leaps from the Searle-scenario that's so appealing to your intuition to a machine powerful enough to hold a conversation. As a trivial example, the Chinese room cannot even simulate a Turing machine unless you give the person inside rather a lot of scratch paper. You can keep countering objections like this by adding more stuff to the Room. So to hold a conversation about the weather, we'll need to add some separate input channels to observe the outside world, and to talk about the Room's plans for today, we'll need to throw in something that can keep track of time, .... it just goes on. (And while you're adding all the extra machinery, don't forget that even the original book is incalculably large, not the merely hefty tome that you're picturing in your mind's eye.) As you do this, you get farther and farther away from the original appeal to your intuition. So far that your only hope of making sense is to acknowledge that your intuitions about the simplified situation has absolutely nothing to do with a Chinese Room powerful enough to actually meet the original stipulation, that the room can "pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese".