5 ms·

> 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

by 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 ago
Right, 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 ago
  Yes, 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?
    - slibhb 5y ago
      You're bringing up scale, not me. The book can contain 10 billion lines of instructions. That's a lot of "scale". The thought experiment is about the concept of understanding/intelligence/consciousness/whatever. It has nothing to do with scale.
      - simonh 5y ago
        If it has nothing to do with scale, then why doesn’t Serle us a realistic example of a vast room, why a book not a library, why a man not an army? I’m bringing up scale because I’m pointing out how it’s being used.
        slibhb 5y ago
        If you insert the adjective "vast" before room, then you get The Vast Chinese Room thought experiment and nothing changes.
        simonh 5y ago
        A lot of people find it credible that a hugely complex fast computer system could be intelligent. Many of them seem to find it convincing that a man in a room with a book can’t “understand Chinese” when he personally doesn’t. But the only difference between them is scale.
        slibhb 5y ago
        > A lot of people find it credible that a hugely complex fast computer system could be intelligent. But not John Searle...so it seems clear that scale has nothing to do with the thought experiment. For Searle, a vast room or an army of people to carry out instructions make no difference. > Many of them seem to find it convincing that a man in a room with a book can’t “understand Chinese” when he personally doesn’t The people who read the thought experiment this way don't understand it. In the thought experiment neither the computer program (no matter how powerful the computer is) nor the man and the room understand Chinese. > But the only difference between them is scale. No, the point of putting a man in the room is that we all agree that a human is capable of understanding. From his vantage point in the room, he can see that the program works by executing instructions without any understanding. All the room does is demystify a hypothetical computer program that can pass a turing test. Searle is not arguing that a machine with understanding/consciousness is impossible. He's arguing against behavioralism ("if it can pass a turing test it understands"). He take the psychological phenomenon of "understanding" (something we're all familiar with) seriously, he thinks it represents a real thing, and that a computer that can pass a turing test doesn't necessarily have it.
  - nl 5y ago
    I think something like OpenAI CLIP + Gpt3 "understands" English at a level comparable to a 7yo. It can respond to questions and explain its answers. Sometimes it's wrong, but so is a 7yo and you can usually understand why. Is it intelligent? Maybe it is.
  - gilmore606 5y ago
    > Do you really think a book with instructions in a room plus a man to carry them out understands Chinese? Do you really think a blob of goo with static sputtering through it, designed by no one, accidentally mutated from pond slime, understands Chinese? I actually find your proposition easier to believe, but here we are.
AgentME 5y ago
This seems like saying since a person's individual neurons can't understand Chinese, then a person can't actually understand Chinese either.
- windows2020 5y ago
  We know how the room works--not the brain. ...Can we break it down and replicate it? Can my sense of self be quantified? What about animals, insects, viruses? Is life unique, or an illusion too? Or, are you the Chinese speaker, and the universe the room?
  - simonh 5y ago
    You seem to be arguing that because we can't do it yet, therefor it can't be done. Or that since we don't yet know how the brain works, that we can never know.
gwd 5y ago
> Searle's answer is obviously not, from which he deduces that the computer program doesn't understand Chinese either. Would Searle feel differently if he'd taken a computer architecture course? There was something strangely magic about making an adder: 1. Learn about boolean logic, Karnaugh maps, etc 2. Define the inputs and outputs of a 4-bit adder, deduce some set of gates which would correspond to those outputs 3. Put those into a circuit similator and put a box around it 4. Suddenly the random AND and OR gates, which look arbitrary and none of which individually know how to do addition, collectively know how to addition. Then you keep scaling that up: Put a bunch of gates together, none of which have memory, and suddenly you have flip-flops and registers. Add an instruction decoder and suddenly it starts zooming along doing things, executing simple programs that you feed it from simulated "memory". But you know that inside is just a spider's nest of logic gates. I myself am religious and believe in a spiritual world distinct from the material world; but the Chinese Room thought experiment was never that compelling to me: I've seen spider webs of logic gates come alive as processors when assembled properly; I don't see an inherent reason why an algorithm of paper plus a very patient human couldn't come together to create something which "understood".

by slibhb 5y ago

simonh 5y ago

Right, 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 ago
Yes, 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?
  - slibhb 5y ago
    You're bringing up scale, not me. The book can contain 10 billion lines of instructions. That's a lot of "scale". The thought experiment is about the concept of understanding/intelligence/consciousness/whatever. It has nothing to do with scale.
    - simonh 5y ago
      If it has nothing to do with scale, then why doesn’t Serle us a realistic example of a vast room, why a book not a library, why a man not an army? I’m bringing up scale because I’m pointing out how it’s being used.
      - slibhb 5y ago
        If you insert the adjective "vast" before room, then you get The Vast Chinese Room thought experiment and nothing changes.
        simonh 5y ago
        A lot of people find it credible that a hugely complex fast computer system could be intelligent. Many of them seem to find it convincing that a man in a room with a book can’t “understand Chinese” when he personally doesn’t. But the only difference between them is scale.
        slibhb 5y ago
        > A lot of people find it credible that a hugely complex fast computer system could be intelligent. But not John Searle...so it seems clear that scale has nothing to do with the thought experiment. For Searle, a vast room or an army of people to carry out instructions make no difference. > Many of them seem to find it convincing that a man in a room with a book can’t “understand Chinese” when he personally doesn’t The people who read the thought experiment this way don't understand it. In the thought experiment neither the computer program (no matter how powerful the computer is) nor the man and the room understand Chinese. > But the only difference between them is scale. No, the point of putting a man in the room is that we all agree that a human is capable of understanding. From his vantage point in the room, he can see that the program works by executing instructions without any understanding. All the room does is demystify a hypothetical computer program that can pass a turing test. Searle is not arguing that a machine with understanding/consciousness is impossible. He's arguing against behavioralism ("if it can pass a turing test it understands"). He take the psychological phenomenon of "understanding" (something we're all familiar with) seriously, he thinks it represents a real thing, and that a computer that can pass a turing test doesn't necessarily have it.
- nl 5y ago
  I think something like OpenAI CLIP + Gpt3 "understands" English at a level comparable to a 7yo. It can respond to questions and explain its answers. Sometimes it's wrong, but so is a 7yo and you can usually understand why. Is it intelligent? Maybe it is.
- gilmore606 5y ago
  > Do you really think a book with instructions in a room plus a man to carry them out understands Chinese? Do you really think a blob of goo with static sputtering through it, designed by no one, accidentally mutated from pond slime, understands Chinese? I actually find your proposition easier to believe, but here we are.

AgentME 5y ago

This seems like saying since a person's individual neurons can't understand Chinese, then a person can't actually understand Chinese either.

windows2020 5y ago
We know how the room works--not the brain. ...Can we break it down and replicate it? Can my sense of self be quantified? What about animals, insects, viruses? Is life unique, or an illusion too? Or, are you the Chinese speaker, and the universe the room?
- simonh 5y ago
  You seem to be arguing that because we can't do it yet, therefor it can't be done. Or that since we don't yet know how the brain works, that we can never know.

gwd 5y ago

> Searle's answer is obviously not, from which he deduces that the computer program doesn't understand Chinese either. Would Searle feel differently if he'd taken a computer architecture course? There was something strangely magic about making an adder: 1. Learn about boolean logic, Karnaugh maps, etc 2. Define the inputs and outputs of a 4-bit adder, deduce some set of gates which would correspond to those outputs 3. Put those into a circuit similator and put a box around it 4. Suddenly the random AND and OR gates, which look arbitrary and none of which individually know how to do addition, collectively know how to addition. Then you keep scaling that up: Put a bunch of gates together, none of which have memory, and suddenly you have flip-flops and registers. Add an instruction decoder and suddenly it starts zooming along doing things, executing simple programs that you feed it from simulated "memory". But you know that inside is just a spider's nest of logic gates. I myself am religious and believe in a spiritual world distinct from the material world; but the Chinese Room thought experiment was never that compelling to me: I've seen spider webs of logic gates come alive as processors when assembled properly; I don't see an inherent reason why an algorithm of paper plus a very patient human couldn't come together to create something which "understood".