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> 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 su

by 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.
        simonh 5y ago
        I don’t see how that’s different from a neurologist examining a human brain. They can see it’s just cytoplasm and electro chemicals oozing around and firing off signals. None of that looks like it understands anything, any more than the symbols moving around in the Chinese room. They can no more point to the place in the brain that understands things than the guy in the Chinese room holding the book can.
        slibhb 5y ago
        The difference is that we all have the subjective experience of understanding. When we have a conversation, we experience other people's words as sounds in our heads laden with meaning. We "understand" each word in the sentence, how the words fit together, what they refer to, and so on. We're all familiar with this experience, right? We're doing it right now through the medium of writing. Searle takes that experience seriously. For him it's real and, in order to have that experience, you need machinery somewhat similiar to what we have. He can't bring himself to believe that a list of instructions and a person dumbly executing them have that sensation of understanding even if they produce the correct output.

by simonh 5y ago

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.
      - simonh 5y ago
        I don’t see how that’s different from a neurologist examining a human brain. They can see it’s just cytoplasm and electro chemicals oozing around and firing off signals. None of that looks like it understands anything, any more than the symbols moving around in the Chinese room. They can no more point to the place in the brain that understands things than the guy in the Chinese room holding the book can.
        slibhb 5y ago
        The difference is that we all have the subjective experience of understanding. When we have a conversation, we experience other people's words as sounds in our heads laden with meaning. We "understand" each word in the sentence, how the words fit together, what they refer to, and so on. We're all familiar with this experience, right? We're doing it right now through the medium of writing. Searle takes that experience seriously. For him it's real and, in order to have that experience, you need machinery somewhat similiar to what we have. He can't bring himself to believe that a list of instructions and a person dumbly executing them have that sensation of understanding even if they produce the correct output.