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The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. The whole premise is a misdirection by having a human execute a Chinese-speaking program by

The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. The whole premise is a misdirection by having a human execute a Chinese-speaking program by hand, then asking if the human understands Chinese, completely ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human. That would be like asking if neurotransmitters understand Chinese instead of focusing on the brain as a whole. Philosophical zombies are a bit more interesting. However it flirts a bit too much with dualism in assuming something indistinguishable from a human can lack some "qualia" that a real human has. A more useful perspective would be from a human brain simulation angle.

bondarchuk 6y ago
Indeed. If you reject that "the room as a whole" speaks Chinese, you reject functionalism. If you think philosophical zombies are conceivable, this is also a rejection of functionalism. Ultimately the acceptance or rejection of functionalism is (as far as I can tell) only a matter of dogma, and these two arguments serve to find out which dogma you (implicitly) subscribe to. Personally I place the rejection of functionalism on basically the same level as the acceptance of dualism. I don't know what precisely has happened to make most serious researchers reject dualism, but perhaps non-functionalism will run the same course.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Not sure about serious, but they are loud for sure, and are memed by other people, maybe even more the latter than the former.
danaliv 6y ago
> A more useful perspective would be from a human brain simulation angle. >The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. Does not compute. :) The Chinese room argument, as I understand it, is not about whether the human understands Chinese. The question is whether the room understands Chinese.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human This is called the systems response to the Chinese Room Argument. [0] Searle's response [0] goes something like this: You're missing the point. Suppose the man in the room memorised the program, so that he could answer the questions himself with no need of external aids. Now, the man and the system are the same, and yet by your account, the man doesn't speak Chinese, but the system does. Personally I find the whole argument to bear no clear connection to the questions of consciousness. The question of whether a system consciously understands a problem is muddled, as it isn't clear a priori that problem-solving competence has any connection to consciousness. To use Dennett's term, a system can be competent without comprehension. A pocket calculator is quite unable to explain what it's doing, but is able to perform superhuman number-crunching. The argument may succeed in tying the reader in a knot, but I figure that's just because most people haven't thought much about what conscious comprehension really means. Another problem with the Chinese Room Argument is that, if it really holds up, it ought to hold up just as well against the human species itself. If you're going to attack the idea that consciousness can arise from non-conscious components, where does that leave us? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtual_mind_replies:_finding_the_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtu...
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  If the man acts as a virtual machine that faithfully runs the program, then it's still the program that understands Chinese, it doesn't matter on what machine it runs. In this case there are two minds: the man's mind and program's mind.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Mind strikes me as a loaded term, being used to mean locus of computation or computation stream, but carrying the implication of consciousness. If you wish to make the case that computation and consciousness are in some sense intertwined, this needs to be done explicitly. The Chinese Room Argument does not do so. (Incidentally I'm of the opinion that they are indeed intertwined.) If a person is manually executing an algorithm (the memorised Chinese Room algorithm, or naive matrix multiplication, or whatever), then we could distinguish between the algorithm and the person executing it. In that sense there are two computation streams at work. That doesn't show that a second consciousness has been brought into being, though. I wouldn't conclude that there are two 'minds'. Your comparison to virtual machines is a good one, it's one that Dennett uses.
bobthechef 6y ago
> The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. The whole premise is a misdirection by having a human execute a Chinese-speaking program by hand, then asking if the human understands Chinese, completely ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human. That would be like asking if neurotransmitters understand Chinese instead of focusing on the brain as a whole. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time with this argument. Seems like there's some unaddressed materialist/eliminativist prejudice underneath it all. The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the symbols it is given (hence the whole idea of an effective method). (Actually, Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs. That is, there is not an objective fact of the matter that a computer is a computer and that it is computing. If you looked at it, there's nothing in what's going on that says "oh, yeah, this machine is adding numbers". Kripke also gets into this with his "quaddition" argument.) When you understand Chinese, reading a symbol or legal string of symbols leads your mind to form conceptual content with some intentionality or signification. We can have other thoughts in response and this can lead to the production of signs with some other signification. The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element. And that's the point. Computers are highly systematized patterns of convention that permit the simulation of some of what we would typically expect of human beings or maybe some other animal, but strictly speaking, they don't even compute anything, much less understand.
- joefourier 6y ago
  Your neurons aren't doing anything except spiking in response to action potentials (among other physical processes). They're just producing outputs given some chain of inputs and have no semantic understanding either. Where does the understanding of Chinese (or English) come from then? Also your assumption of the program not forming any conceptual content, will depend on what exactly the program is doing. The Chinese room says it's carrying out a conversation in a manner indistinguishable from a human, but that could mean anything from running a very fancy GPT-3 to running a whole-brain simulation of a Chinese person. In either case, the human running the program is a distraction. You might as well ask if the pencil or the book he's using to compute the instructions understands Chinese. If the program was running on a CPU, it'd be the same thing - the CPU doesn't understand Chinese, the program does.

bondarchuk 6y ago

Indeed. If you reject that "the room as a whole" speaks Chinese, you reject functionalism. If you think philosophical zombies are conceivable, this is also a rejection of functionalism. Ultimately the acceptance or rejection of functionalism is (as far as I can tell) only a matter of dogma, and these two arguments serve to find out which dogma you (implicitly) subscribe to. Personally I place the rejection of functionalism on basically the same level as the acceptance of dualism. I don't know what precisely has happened to make most serious researchers reject dualism, but perhaps non-functionalism will run the same course.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago
Not sure about serious, but they are loud for sure, and are memed by other people, maybe even more the latter than the former.

danaliv 6y ago

> A more useful perspective would be from a human brain simulation angle. >The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. Does not compute. :) The Chinese room argument, as I understand it, is not about whether the human understands Chinese. The question is whether the room understands Chinese.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human This is called the systems response to the Chinese Room Argument. [0] Searle's response [0] goes something like this: You're missing the point. Suppose the man in the room memorised the program, so that he could answer the questions himself with no need of external aids. Now, the man and the system are the same, and yet by your account, the man doesn't speak Chinese, but the system does. Personally I find the whole argument to bear no clear connection to the questions of consciousness. The question of whether a system consciously understands a problem is muddled, as it isn't clear a priori that problem-solving competence has any connection to consciousness. To use Dennett's term, a system can be competent without comprehension. A pocket calculator is quite unable to explain what it's doing, but is able to perform superhuman number-crunching. The argument may succeed in tying the reader in a knot, but I figure that's just because most people haven't thought much about what conscious comprehension really means. Another problem with the Chinese Room Argument is that, if it really holds up, it ought to hold up just as well against the human species itself. If you're going to attack the idea that consciousness can arise from non-conscious components, where does that leave us? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtual_mind_replies:_finding_the_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtu...

GoblinSlayer 6y ago
If the man acts as a virtual machine that faithfully runs the program, then it's still the program that understands Chinese, it doesn't matter on what machine it runs. In this case there are two minds: the man's mind and program's mind.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Mind strikes me as a loaded term, being used to mean locus of computation or computation stream, but carrying the implication of consciousness. If you wish to make the case that computation and consciousness are in some sense intertwined, this needs to be done explicitly. The Chinese Room Argument does not do so. (Incidentally I'm of the opinion that they are indeed intertwined.) If a person is manually executing an algorithm (the memorised Chinese Room algorithm, or naive matrix multiplication, or whatever), then we could distinguish between the algorithm and the person executing it. In that sense there are two computation streams at work. That doesn't show that a second consciousness has been brought into being, though. I wouldn't conclude that there are two 'minds'. Your comparison to virtual machines is a good one, it's one that Dennett uses.

bobthechef 6y ago

> The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. The whole premise is a misdirection by having a human execute a Chinese-speaking program by hand, then asking if the human understands Chinese, completely ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human. That would be like asking if neurotransmitters understand Chinese instead of focusing on the brain as a whole. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time with this argument. Seems like there's some unaddressed materialist/eliminativist prejudice underneath it all. The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the symbols it is given (hence the whole idea of an effective method). (Actually, Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs. That is, there is not an objective fact of the matter that a computer is a computer and that it is computing. If you looked at it, there's nothing in what's going on that says "oh, yeah, this machine is adding numbers". Kripke also gets into this with his "quaddition" argument.) When you understand Chinese, reading a symbol or legal string of symbols leads your mind to form conceptual content with some intentionality or signification. We can have other thoughts in response and this can lead to the production of signs with some other signification. The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element. And that's the point. Computers are highly systematized patterns of convention that permit the simulation of some of what we would typically expect of human beings or maybe some other animal, but strictly speaking, they don't even compute anything, much less understand.

joefourier 6y ago
Your neurons aren't doing anything except spiking in response to action potentials (among other physical processes). They're just producing outputs given some chain of inputs and have no semantic understanding either. Where does the understanding of Chinese (or English) come from then? Also your assumption of the program not forming any conceptual content, will depend on what exactly the program is doing. The Chinese room says it's carrying out a conversation in a manner indistinguishable from a human, but that could mean anything from running a very fancy GPT-3 to running a whole-brain simulation of a Chinese person. In either case, the human running the program is a distraction. You might as well ask if the pencil or the book he's using to compute the instructions understands Chinese. If the program was running on a CPU, it'd be the same thing - the CPU doesn't understand Chinese, the program does.