4 ms·
That argument is fundamentally flawed. It correctly points out that the person in the room doesn't know Chinese but it misses the bigger point. Of course, the
by ThomPete 8y ago
That argument is fundamentally flawed.
It correctly points out that the person in the room doesn't know Chinese but it misses the bigger point.
Of course, the person in the room doesn't know Chinese just as the individual neuron in the brain doesn't know Chinese.
The room or the house (i.e. the feedback loop) is the conscious part.
The correct answer is "we don't know". But we do know that we are ourselves the result of emerging complexity built by much simpler structures and that they are built on even simpler structures until in the end some primordial soup.
The mistake is isolating any individual element in the feedback loop and claiming that because that doesn't have some "magic" properties the system as a whole can't.
- rjsw 8y agoThe person in the room will also start to recognize patterns in the input messages and the resulting output messages. It isn't the canonical understanding of Chinese but it is "an" understanding If Searle was correct we could do an MRI on a blind person and detect when their brain switched into "symbol processing mode" if a conversation with them covered any visual concepts.
- ForHackernews 8y ago> If Searle was correct we could do an MRI on a blind person and detect when their brain switched into "symbol processing mode" if a conversation with them covered any visual concepts. I think that is true, at least to some extent: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667661/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667661/ particularly for people who weren't blind from birth.
- mannykannot 8y agoThe Chinese Room argument fails to make its case, but not for that reason - Searle claims that no such instruction book could be written, and so the experiment could not be performed, meaning that the subject would have no possibility of learning from the outputs generated by performing it. If the experiment could be started, whatever the subject would learn from performing the role would be moot, as merely by getting started, without the subject initially knowing anything of the language in which the questions were posed, it would have refuted Searle. The reason the argument fails to make its case is that Searle does not have an effective response to the 'systems reply': in the paper, his response is a mixture of appeals to intuition, together with the erroneous claim that if the subject memorized the instructions, then the systems reply would not apply.
- stcredzero 8y agoThat argument is fundamentally flawed. Yes. However, his other observation about AI turns out to be spot on.
- ThomPete 8y agoWhat observation?
- thedailymail 8y agoI'm guessing the observation "that AI was nothing more than the automation and repackaging of the output of human intelligence" mentioned above
- mannykannot 8y agoThat's also how I take it, and there are two different types of AI being discussed here: the 'Chinese Room' paper is about the possibility of conscious machines, while the 'repackaging' comment is about current technology.
- ThomPete 8y agoOk but i am not sure people in the industry would claim otherwise, also not sure what the point is.