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The Chinese room argument is a parlour trick that uses scale as a distraction. It posits a person in a room manipulating symbols to produce intelligent seeming
by simonh 5y ago
The Chinese room argument is a parlour trick that uses scale as a distraction. It posits a person in a room manipulating symbols to produce intelligent seeming outputs. It says, see, it’s absurd to think a person in a room with a stack of symbols could emulate intelligence.
But let’s say the room contains many billions of people, it is the size of a planet, and it contains racks of many trillions of symbols, and it spends millions or billions of years to produce an output. That’s more like the scale of a sophisticated computer system, or a brain.
Does that sound much like a man in a room with some symbols? No. Does it sound like that could do complex calculations and produce sophisticated and perhaps even intelligent outputs? Well, given enough time and scale, yes why not?
The Chinese room is pure misdirection and it amazes me anyone falls for it. There’s really no actual argument there.
- colinmhayes 5y agoI mean I agree, but a third of philosophers subscribe to dualism, so I wouldn't be so quick to write the whole thing off.
- simonh 5y agoDual meaning two, right? Material and non material. As far as I can tell not one of them can describe what the second non material thing in dualism is, or what any of its properties are. Even they seem to have no idea what they actually believe.
- colinmhayes 5y agoThey believe it's not possible to explain human consciousness as a purely physical concept. I don't see why they need to explain what it is that isn't material to make that claim.
- simonh 5y agoI just want a coherent explanation of their belief. They’re the ones positing something non material, not me. I just what you know what it is they mean by that. Absent that, I don’t see how they can claim their belief is coherent.
- colinmhayes 5y agoI’m not especially well versed, but as I understand it they believe we don’t know the essence of the non material part and in fact it being unknowable is sort of the point. This sort of reminds me of the people who claim the Big Bang is incoherent because we don’t know what came before it. Why is I don’t know not good enough?
- simonh 5y agoI suppose that’s fair to a point. It’s just disappointing. The thing is this non material whatever can’t have properties. If it stores information, has state and has consistent behaviour then really it’s just a form of material (in the philosophical sense that it’s a part of the world), so it can’t have any of those. At which point, how does it even interact with the world at all? I mean if it influences the brain, then that mechanism of influence makes it part of the world, right? It makes it material. That’s where I find the idea incoherent. I don’t see how it can be both immaterial but also have material effects. Doing so makes it material, I think by definition. It means it must be part of material reality in that sense. Or at least I’d like to hear an argument why it doesn’t.
- prometheus76 5y agoWhat is the material evidence for numbers? What is the material evidence for logic? What is the material evidence for persistence of identity over time? What is the material evidence for math? What is the material evidence for categories? What is the material evidence for grammar? What is the material evidence for a mayor (not the mayor qua person, but the mayor qua office)? What is the material evidence for marriage? According to empirical evidence, which knife is the best knife? There is no "best" without purpose. And materialism has nothing to say about purposes. Empiricism can only work when an agent in the world has a specific purpose. There are vast swathes of human experience that don't fit tidily in the box of materialism or empiricism.
- simonh 5y agoThose things are behaviours and information that can be encoded in matter. If the non material thing in dualism is just emergent behaviour, then it’s not adding anything beyond what we already have in materialism.
- tacocataco 5y agoSeems like something someone believes out of hope right? That there is something more than this. That it isn't just over. Something to keep people from giving up. Edit: hope it didn't come off like I was talking down to people who believe what they believe. It's your life, it's your after life. Stay safe yall.
- lern_too_spel 5y agoDualism is simply an ivory tower God of the gaps. To these sophists, anything we can't explain now can be decomposed into a physical and metaphysical part.
- throwawaygal7 5y agoI think the Chinese room experiment is pretty effective, but a person might say the room is conscious and one might not. We all agree that, if we had a Chinese room in front of us, the only real way to tell would be a Turing style test.
- slibhb 5y ago> It says, see, it’s absurd to think a person in a room with a stack of symbols could emulate intelligence. That's not at all what it says. It says: 1. Assume a computer program can pass a turing test 2. Convert the computer program into a list of steps that a human in a room can follow 3. Put a human in the room. Pass him a slip of paper with Chinese writing. Have him follow the steps to generate a response. 4. Now consider, once you've done this, does the human in the room following those steps understand Chinese? Searle's answer is obviously not, from which he deduces that the computer program doesn't understand Chinese either.
- simonh 5y agoRight, but the person in the room isn’t the computer program. He’s not even the whole computer. He’s just a component of the system. It’s the system that we should consider as understanding Chinese, not just a piece of it. He’s following a set of instructions so he doesn’t even have all of those in mind at once either. By abstracting the system as a man in a room were distracted to think we’re considering the system when we’re not. If the man in the room is one of billions of men, at massive scale which is a more realistic model, that becomes obvious.
- slibhb 5y agoYes, one response to the thought experiment is "the whole system understands Chinese". I don't find that response convincing. Do you really think a book with instructions in a room plus a man to carry them out understands Chinese? The thought experiment hinges on the concept of understanding. If you want to argue against Searle, and you can, your best bet is to attack that concept, to argue that "understanding" is an illusion or that it's nonsensical. This is what philosophers like Daniel Dennet have done.
- simonh 5y ago> Do you really think a book with instructions in a room plus a man to carry them out understands Chinese? Again with the scale misdirection. Are you really sure a room the size of Jupiter with a rule book the size of many libraries, full of trillions of people following the rules, shuffling quadrillions of symbols for millions of years definitely can’t ever understand Chinese? Not in any sense?
- _xnmw 5y agoNo, you're misunderstanding the Chinese room argument completely. It's not about scale, it's about the concept of "understanding" something. Here's another version that might make sense to programmers. I know Python, and I can read/write/compile Python code in my head. My computer's REPL can also read/compile Python code by following a detailed set of pre-programmed instructions to convert it to machine code. Nevertheless the computer does not "understand" Python, it cannot write Python code in response to any problem, nor does it "understand" Python the way a person does. It is not a programmer, and a programmer "understands" the language and can produce new creative meaningful output, and doesn't merely follow instructions.
- agency 5y agoIt seems like the Chinese room argument is incompatible with a materialist world view. To a materialist, what could the brain be but a computer? Some sort of physical process is taking place inside that is is processing information, and at some level of abstraction that process will look like "dumb" symbolic manipulation. Yet we achieve "understanding"
- colinmhayes 5y agoYes that is the point. The Chinese room is a thought experiment meant to prove dualism.
- slibhb 5y agoNo it's not. Searle is explicitly not a dualist.
- simonh 5y agoHe thinks conciseness is a physical property. It's not clear to me why he thinks only brains, or maybe only living things, can have this property. He makes the analogy that a weather simulation in a computer can't make anything wet so therefore a computer program can't have a thought. My take is that when we think about rain we don't get wet either. Human minds are the same sort of thing as the weather simulation, not the same sort of thing as the weather. For me thoughts are simulations, or models, or operations on models, and that those activities are tractable to computation.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIt’s not a parkour trick when it is understood :)
- yesbabyyes 5y agoIndeed, but is the human mind truly advanced enough to understand parkour?