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In the early 90's I did a short undergraduate course about the philosophy of the mind. The main text was Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind. I was never convinced

In the early 90's I did a short undergraduate course about the philosophy of the mind. The main text was Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind. I was never convinced by Searle's Chinese room thought experiment and I always wondered if I lacked the sophistication to understand the argument or whether the argument itself made too much of an appeal to subjective rather than objective reasoning. And so I find it interesting that Searle is not mentioned in the article.

briga 9y ago
Personally I found the book tedious--Searle makes lots on personal attacks on his philosophical rivals, but he does little to actually refute their ideas. He strikes me as someone who is so invested in his ideas that the possibility that he could be wrong is inconceivable.
hyperpape 9y ago
I don't know what your professor's viewpoint was, but my sense is that the Chinese Room, as taught in undergrad classes, is mostly a punching bag. It's a very clever thought experiment, but you're not meant to believe it. My sense is that Searle is more famous in philosophy for his work in philosophy of language. "subjective rather than objective reasoning." <-- I don't know what you mean by this.
- mcguire 9y ago
  It's purely an attack on symbolic (and possibly neural network-ish/statistical) artificial intelligence. I myself, however, don't think it's a particularly good attack.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  > but my sense is that the Chinese Room, as taught in undergrad classes, is mostly a punching bag. this is more or less how I learned it in my classes. we had to write a paper detailing our understanding of one of the major attacks against the chinese room (the systems neurobiology attack was my personal favorite)
mcguire 9y ago
In the late 80's, I was interested enough in artificial intelligence to take several classes in philosophy of mind; then and since, I have never been able to distinguish Searle's Chinese room argument from plain dualism. (The apparently separate idea of "biologicalism" that I've heard from some about Searle and (sort-of) from Penrose don't make any sense to me.)
- foldr 9y ago
  Nothing in Searle's argument suggests that consciousness isn't physical. If anything he is less of a dualist than his functionalist critics, since he sees consciousness as being inherently tied to specific kinds of physical system.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    The specific argument suggests a tiny homunculus who lives in your head and and understands English. The biologist argument requires something special in organic chemistry, something unknown, that is incompatible with other physics? Quantum mechanics? Bell's Inequality.
    - foldr 9y ago
      >The specific argument suggests a tiny homunculus who lives in your head and and understands English. I don't see how you are getting that from anything Searle says. > The biologist argument requires something special in organic chemistry, something unknown, that is incompatible with other physics? We can't know at our present level of understanding whether or not it will be compatible with current physics. But anyway, perhaps current physics will need some revision before we can understand consciousness. It's hard to rule out any possibility at present.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    Searle is expecting you to reject the idea that the system understands Chinese, from your common sense intuition. In his view this conclusion is obvious.
bnjmn 9y ago
For what it's worth, Daniel Dennett spends considerable time in _Consciousness Explained_ (and his other books) deconstructing both why Searle's Chinese Room argument is misleading, and also why is seems intuitively appealing (he calls it an "intuition pump"). I suspect you would find Dennett's treatment of Searle very much aligned with your skepticism!
- darkmighty 9y ago
  Could you perhaps summarize Dennett's counter argument to Chinese Room?
  - sethev 9y ago
    I'd say Dennett's claim is that Chinese Room isn't an argument at all. The reason it has a guy in the room is because we're used to people understanding language. It applies just as well to components of the brain, like neurons (as currently understood - i.e. primarily mechanistic). There's no "guy" sitting in your brain who understands English. In fact I think a lot of people miss that Searle's core claim is that there's something fundamental about consciousness in the same way that there's something fundamental about the foundations of physics. Searle is arguing against the idea that neurons, individually or collectively, can be conscious.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    The entire house understands Chinese note the person in it, just like your individual neurons don't understand Chinese either. Don't know what Dennets counter is but it's probably pretty close to that.
    - draw_down 9y ago
      Searle explicitly addresses this point in his original argument for the Chinese room. Something I’ve found rather convincing about the Chinese room is that he predicted many of the counterarguments ahead of time and addressed them, but people still present them as if he hadn’t thought of them.
deleted 9y ago
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bobthechef 9y ago
What are "subjective reasoning" and "objective reasoning"? It's not clear what you mean.
erokar 9y ago
I think Searl's central argument still stands: Computers as we know them today can only simulate the human mind but can never bee consiuos, since they cannot expereince qualia like humans and probably other animals do. I have always found Dennett completely unconvincing. He falls into the behaviorism trap: Since we cannot objectively observe consiousness, it does not exist.
- apk-d 9y ago
  I fail to observe the difference between simulating a human mind on a computer and on a synaptic network. Why would a program run differently depending on the underlying hardware? (assuming sufficiently faithful simulation as opposed to some approximation)
  - erokar 9y ago
    Searle's argument is that consiousness is not a function of the program (there is no "program" in the human mind), but a function of hardware. Though just how the meat machine that is our brains produces consiousness is very poorly understood, it stand to reason that a computer is so different from it physically that it's no more likely a computer can acheive consoiusness than a stone or a car.
    - apk-d 9y ago
      To me that sounds more like an immediate presupposition than an argument. I don't see why I'd favor an explanation of "consciousness is computation within a special magic meat brain" over simply "consciousness is computation", at least until we determine that brains run on special meat magic, of which so far there appears to be little evidence. I'm also not entirely convinced by implicit promises that "we'll discover this later when our understanding of brains is better".
      - foldr 9y ago
        Searle's point is that given what we currently understand about consciousness (i.e. nothing), there is no reason at all to think that consciousness will arise in any physical system that implements a particular kind of program. You talk about "magic meat brains", but one could just as well talk about "magic programs", since we have no idea how implementing a particular set of computations could give rise to conscious experience. Searle's bet is that the specific physical properties of the brain will turn out to be important for consciousness. Can we be sure of that? Of course not. But everyone in this domain is guessing.
bobthechef 9y ago
Everyone in this thread keeps claiming that the Chinese Room argument is bad. Nobody says why.
- dghf 9y ago
  Dennett does a pretty good job (to my mind) of undermining it in Consciousness Explained: you can read part of the relevant section on Google Books [0]. Or this SMBC [1] summarises the argument pretty well, if somewhat sarcastically. [0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=d2P_QS6AwgoC&q=chinese+room#v=snippet&q=chinese%20room&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=d2P_QS6AwgoC... [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-chinese-room https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-chinese-room
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  Searle does not prove that the distinction between "actually understanding Chinese symbols" and "simulating the ability to understand Chinese symbols" is a real one. Physicalists, including me, believe this is just a confusion generated from our inside view of our consciousness, and that "really understanding" is just something a computer program thinks it can do once it gets complex enough to be conscious. At the bottom level it's still just pushing symbols around via syntactic rules (in the case of the mind, natural law).
  - noam87 9y ago
    > "really understanding" is just something a computer program thinks it can do once it gets complex enough to be conscious. At the same time, consciousness might not be a requisite of higher intelligence at all; it could merely have been evolutionarily advantageous early on in the development of complex brains because of our natural environment... it's hard to imagine an intelligent animal with no "me" program doing very well. But maybe a digital intelligence (one that did not evolve having to worry about feeding itself, acquiring rare resources, mating, communicating socially, etc.) would have no use for a central "me" program that "really experiences" things. Such a creature is kind of eerie to think about.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
zerostar07 9y ago
Searle might have be justified to ask this kind of questions in the early 80s, but more recent advances in neurosciences render the conscience-first approach to intelligence increasingly irrelevant.
ThomPete 9y ago
Searles Chinese Room argument is very typical of the circular reasoning that many analytical philosophers, unfortunately, run into. Of course the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese just like the individual neurons in my brain doesn't either. It's the entire house that's conscious. One reason why the mind is so hard to grasp and why people like Searle ends up with something like The Chinese Room argument which is really, to be honest a very sloppy argument is because of our obsession with turning it into a thing which can be located. A much more fruitful way to think about the mind is as a pattern recognizing feedback loop and then reason from there. That also gives you a much better idea way to think about evolution and how not just the conscious but the self-aware conscious mind come to be. Gregory Bateson has some really interesting thoughts on that IMO.
turingcompeteme 9y ago
Scott Aaronson has an interesting take on the Chinese room theorem that tackles it from a computational complexity point of view: Let's say this Chinese rule book does exist, and that it can provide an answer to every single possible question asked it. It would need to have an answer for every possible combination of words in the Chinese language. This is an unimaginably large amount of data. There are more combinations than there are atoms in the universe. This book and room simply can't exist as a 'Lookup'. Even if it did, you would need robots flying around at the speed of light retrieving information. I wouldn't have trouble calling such a system intelligent. So if this room were to exist, and was a reasonable size, then there must be some incredible intelligence involved in scaling it down to this size. He talks about it in his book: Quantum Computing Since Democritus.
vanderZwan 9y ago
I had to look that one up. It looks like a variant of the philosophical zombie argument, which I always found fascinating because as far as I can see, that one really argues that consciousness is the illusion, not that physicalism is false. Although I think the main issue might be that the word "illusion" is no really appropriate here. I figure the mind is analogous to a moiré pattern: it's real, it emerges from underlying patterns interacting with each other, it is distinct from those patterns, but it cannot exist without them. Which is probably also why looking for consciousness in the brain is fruitless: you will not find the moiré pattern in its component patterns either. I was so impressed with myself as an art student that I made an artwork about that. I think that's when I hit peak pretentiousness, glad I switched to programming. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern [3] http://jobleonard.nl/books/Contemplating/ http://jobleonard.nl/books/Contemplating/

briga 9y ago

Personally I found the book tedious--Searle makes lots on personal attacks on his philosophical rivals, but he does little to actually refute their ideas. He strikes me as someone who is so invested in his ideas that the possibility that he could be wrong is inconceivable.

hyperpape 9y ago

I don't know what your professor's viewpoint was, but my sense is that the Chinese Room, as taught in undergrad classes, is mostly a punching bag. It's a very clever thought experiment, but you're not meant to believe it. My sense is that Searle is more famous in philosophy for his work in philosophy of language. "subjective rather than objective reasoning." <-- I don't know what you mean by this.

mcguire 9y ago
It's purely an attack on symbolic (and possibly neural network-ish/statistical) artificial intelligence. I myself, however, don't think it's a particularly good attack.
cryoshon 9y ago
> but my sense is that the Chinese Room, as taught in undergrad classes, is mostly a punching bag. this is more or less how I learned it in my classes. we had to write a paper detailing our understanding of one of the major attacks against the chinese room (the systems neurobiology attack was my personal favorite)

mcguire 9y ago

In the late 80's, I was interested enough in artificial intelligence to take several classes in philosophy of mind; then and since, I have never been able to distinguish Searle's Chinese room argument from plain dualism. (The apparently separate idea of "biologicalism" that I've heard from some about Searle and (sort-of) from Penrose don't make any sense to me.)

foldr 9y ago
Nothing in Searle's argument suggests that consciousness isn't physical. If anything he is less of a dualist than his functionalist critics, since he sees consciousness as being inherently tied to specific kinds of physical system.
- mcguire 9y ago
  The specific argument suggests a tiny homunculus who lives in your head and and understands English. The biologist argument requires something special in organic chemistry, something unknown, that is incompatible with other physics? Quantum mechanics? Bell's Inequality.
  - foldr 9y ago
    >The specific argument suggests a tiny homunculus who lives in your head and and understands English. I don't see how you are getting that from anything Searle says. > The biologist argument requires something special in organic chemistry, something unknown, that is incompatible with other physics? We can't know at our present level of understanding whether or not it will be compatible with current physics. But anyway, perhaps current physics will need some revision before we can understand consciousness. It's hard to rule out any possibility at present.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  Searle is expecting you to reject the idea that the system understands Chinese, from your common sense intuition. In his view this conclusion is obvious.

bnjmn 9y ago

For what it's worth, Daniel Dennett spends considerable time in _Consciousness Explained_ (and his other books) deconstructing both why Searle's Chinese Room argument is misleading, and also why is seems intuitively appealing (he calls it an "intuition pump"). I suspect you would find Dennett's treatment of Searle very much aligned with your skepticism!

darkmighty 9y ago
Could you perhaps summarize Dennett's counter argument to Chinese Room?
- sethev 9y ago
  I'd say Dennett's claim is that Chinese Room isn't an argument at all. The reason it has a guy in the room is because we're used to people understanding language. It applies just as well to components of the brain, like neurons (as currently understood - i.e. primarily mechanistic). There's no "guy" sitting in your brain who understands English. In fact I think a lot of people miss that Searle's core claim is that there's something fundamental about consciousness in the same way that there's something fundamental about the foundations of physics. Searle is arguing against the idea that neurons, individually or collectively, can be conscious.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  The entire house understands Chinese note the person in it, just like your individual neurons don't understand Chinese either. Don't know what Dennets counter is but it's probably pretty close to that.
  - draw_down 9y ago
    Searle explicitly addresses this point in his original argument for the Chinese room. Something I’ve found rather convincing about the Chinese room is that he predicted many of the counterarguments ahead of time and addressed them, but people still present them as if he hadn’t thought of them.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bobthechef 9y ago

What are "subjective reasoning" and "objective reasoning"? It's not clear what you mean.

erokar 9y ago

I think Searl's central argument still stands: Computers as we know them today can only simulate the human mind but can never bee consiuos, since they cannot expereince qualia like humans and probably other animals do. I have always found Dennett completely unconvincing. He falls into the behaviorism trap: Since we cannot objectively observe consiousness, it does not exist.

apk-d 9y ago
I fail to observe the difference between simulating a human mind on a computer and on a synaptic network. Why would a program run differently depending on the underlying hardware? (assuming sufficiently faithful simulation as opposed to some approximation)
- erokar 9y ago
  Searle's argument is that consiousness is not a function of the program (there is no "program" in the human mind), but a function of hardware. Though just how the meat machine that is our brains produces consiousness is very poorly understood, it stand to reason that a computer is so different from it physically that it's no more likely a computer can acheive consoiusness than a stone or a car.
  - apk-d 9y ago
    To me that sounds more like an immediate presupposition than an argument. I don't see why I'd favor an explanation of "consciousness is computation within a special magic meat brain" over simply "consciousness is computation", at least until we determine that brains run on special meat magic, of which so far there appears to be little evidence. I'm also not entirely convinced by implicit promises that "we'll discover this later when our understanding of brains is better".
    - foldr 9y ago
      Searle's point is that given what we currently understand about consciousness (i.e. nothing), there is no reason at all to think that consciousness will arise in any physical system that implements a particular kind of program. You talk about "magic meat brains", but one could just as well talk about "magic programs", since we have no idea how implementing a particular set of computations could give rise to conscious experience. Searle's bet is that the specific physical properties of the brain will turn out to be important for consciousness. Can we be sure of that? Of course not. But everyone in this domain is guessing.

bobthechef 9y ago

Everyone in this thread keeps claiming that the Chinese Room argument is bad. Nobody says why.

dghf 9y ago
Dennett does a pretty good job (to my mind) of undermining it in Consciousness Explained: you can read part of the relevant section on Google Books [0]. Or this SMBC [1] summarises the argument pretty well, if somewhat sarcastically. [0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=d2P_QS6AwgoC&q=chinese+room#v=snippet&q=chinese%20room&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&id=d2P_QS6AwgoC... [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-chinese-room https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-chinese-room
Analemma_ 9y ago
Searle does not prove that the distinction between "actually understanding Chinese symbols" and "simulating the ability to understand Chinese symbols" is a real one. Physicalists, including me, believe this is just a confusion generated from our inside view of our consciousness, and that "really understanding" is just something a computer program thinks it can do once it gets complex enough to be conscious. At the bottom level it's still just pushing symbols around via syntactic rules (in the case of the mind, natural law).
- noam87 9y ago
  > "really understanding" is just something a computer program thinks it can do once it gets complex enough to be conscious. At the same time, consciousness might not be a requisite of higher intelligence at all; it could merely have been evolutionarily advantageous early on in the development of complex brains because of our natural environment... it's hard to imagine an intelligent animal with no "me" program doing very well. But maybe a digital intelligence (one that did not evolve having to worry about feeding itself, acquiring rare resources, mating, communicating socially, etc.) would have no use for a central "me" program that "really experiences" things. Such a creature is kind of eerie to think about.
hackinthebochs 9y ago

zerostar07 9y ago

Searle might have be justified to ask this kind of questions in the early 80s, but more recent advances in neurosciences render the conscience-first approach to intelligence increasingly irrelevant.

ThomPete 9y ago

Searles Chinese Room argument is very typical of the circular reasoning that many analytical philosophers, unfortunately, run into. Of course the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese just like the individual neurons in my brain doesn't either. It's the entire house that's conscious. One reason why the mind is so hard to grasp and why people like Searle ends up with something like The Chinese Room argument which is really, to be honest a very sloppy argument is because of our obsession with turning it into a thing which can be located. A much more fruitful way to think about the mind is as a pattern recognizing feedback loop and then reason from there. That also gives you a much better idea way to think about evolution and how not just the conscious but the self-aware conscious mind come to be. Gregory Bateson has some really interesting thoughts on that IMO.

turingcompeteme 9y ago

Scott Aaronson has an interesting take on the Chinese room theorem that tackles it from a computational complexity point of view: Let's say this Chinese rule book does exist, and that it can provide an answer to every single possible question asked it. It would need to have an answer for every possible combination of words in the Chinese language. This is an unimaginably large amount of data. There are more combinations than there are atoms in the universe. This book and room simply can't exist as a 'Lookup'. Even if it did, you would need robots flying around at the speed of light retrieving information. I wouldn't have trouble calling such a system intelligent. So if this room were to exist, and was a reasonable size, then there must be some incredible intelligence involved in scaling it down to this size. He talks about it in his book: Quantum Computing Since Democritus.

vanderZwan 9y ago

I had to look that one up. It looks like a variant of the philosophical zombie argument, which I always found fascinating because as far as I can see, that one really argues that consciousness is the illusion, not that physicalism is false. Although I think the main issue might be that the word "illusion" is no really appropriate here. I figure the mind is analogous to a moiré pattern: it's real, it emerges from underlying patterns interacting with each other, it is distinct from those patterns, but it cannot exist without them. Which is probably also why looking for consciousness in the brain is fruitless: you will not find the moiré pattern in its component patterns either. I was so impressed with myself as an art student that I made an artwork about that. I think that's when I hit peak pretentiousness, glad I switched to programming. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern [3] http://jobleonard.nl/books/Contemplating/ http://jobleonard.nl/books/Contemplating/