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> If he could, and the function truly produced a normal response to any Chinese phrase in existence, then he would speak Chinese I don't necessarily disagree,
by colinmhayes 5y ago
> If he could, and the function truly produced a normal response to any Chinese phrase in existence, then he would speak Chinese
I don't necessarily disagree, but it's not so simple. Just because the man speaks chinese doesn't mean he understands it. He could have figured out the proper output for every possible input without knowing what any of it means. If the next person asks in English "what did you talk about with the last person?" what would he answer, assuming he also speaks english? Really the question comes down to if the computer is able to write the book by observing I guess, but even then you could conceive of a different book with instructions on how to write the translation book.
- burkaman 5y agoYou're right, I will edit my comment. Thanks for this framing.
- quinnjh 5y agoOne of you said a few comments up: "then the question arises: what is missing?" And i just wanna pour us all a cup of tea and sit with that. It reminds me of the song "anything you can do, i can do better, i can do anything better than you - No you cant! Yes i can!.." The issue is- tell me what it cant do. Explain to me what the chinese room is not understanding. Whatever model you use to translate the missing functions can then be "encoded". Id like to think my cpu has a brain and it goes off dreaming with the idle threads- but im also quite convinced that every single thread that runs machine code is a non-concious direct representation of the mental model i encoded into its functions.