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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 c

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".

dhume 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. Right, this discussion is imcomplete without bringing in Church's thesis. * 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.* Or these could be predefined and static. (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.) This is like objecting that a Turing machine would take too many steps to solve a sufficiently large instance of some problem (e.g. more than there are Planck times in the age of the universe). The problem is still Turing-computable.
ekiru 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." In what way is a hypothetical person using "a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program)" different from a universal Turing machine executing the same instructions? When Turing manually executed his computer chess program, how did this differ from having a computer execute it? "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." I fail to understand how this portion of what you're saying disagrees at all with what I said. I don't really see the rest of what you say as disagreeing with what I said, but it is at least not identical to it.

dhume 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. Right, this discussion is imcomplete without bringing in Church's thesis. * 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.* Or these could be predefined and static. (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.) This is like objecting that a Turing machine would take too many steps to solve a sufficiently large instance of some problem (e.g. more than there are Planck times in the age of the universe). The problem is still Turing-computable.

ekiru 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." In what way is a hypothetical person using "a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program)" different from a universal Turing machine executing the same instructions? When Turing manually executed his computer chess program, how did this differ from having a computer execute it? "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." I fail to understand how this portion of what you're saying disagrees at all with what I said. I don't really see the rest of what you say as disagreeing with what I said, but it is at least not identical to it.