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It 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 ph
by agency 5y ago
It 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.
- eru 5y agoHow do we know that what we achieve is different from what the Chinese Room achieves? Doesn't that beg the question?
- staticman2 5y agoNothing about materialism implies lumping organic and inorganic substances into a catchall term "computer" leads to greater understanding of how either works.