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If you insert the adjective "vast" before room, then you get The Vast Chinese Room thought experiment and nothing changes.

by slibhb 5y ago

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.
      - simonh 5y ago
        I take that experience seriously too. I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. I don't think he has any good reason to believe otherwise, or any good argument against it. Nothing he says about the mechanisms of the Chinese room can't also be said about the mundane physical mechanisms of neurology.
        slibhb 5y ago
        > I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. Neither does Searle. He says that humans are such machines. Per Searle, if you want to build a system that has subjective experiences of consciousness and understanding, it would have to have physical parts that correspond to some degree to the physical parts that give rise to our subjective experiences (or an animal's subjective experiences). It couldn't be a list of instructions to be executed. I don't know if Searle is right about this but I find myself unable to dismiss his argument as obviously wrong.
        simonh 5y ago
        You don't think it's obvious that actual computers and robots have physical parts? I'm sorry, I'm at a loss.
  - tigen 5y ago
    > 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. Who says the computer doesn't understand Chinese, though? In this case "the computer" is the system. The program, being the code, isn't a process. The man is acting as a mechanical piece of hardware. But the computer running the program is an active process with state. I heard a lecture by Searle on this. He mentioned the idea that "the room understands Chinese" and simply dismissed it as absurd without considering it. This is exactly the problem with his argument. Well, that and the casual conflation of the man with the computer as if the CPU hardware is the system.
    - simonh 5y ago
      Right, exactly, it is absurd to think one man in a room with some symbols can generate understanding. But only because of scale, because we imagine a regular sized room, a normal sized book and a table with symbols on it. But it’s absurd because that system is incredibly simple, not due to any actual argument from fundamentals.

If you insert the adjective "vast" before room, then you get The Vast Chinese Room thought experiment and nothing changes.

by 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.
    - simonh 5y ago
      I take that experience seriously too. I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. I don't think he has any good reason to believe otherwise, or any good argument against it. Nothing he says about the mechanisms of the Chinese room can't also be said about the mundane physical mechanisms of neurology.
      - slibhb 5y ago
        > I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. Neither does Searle. He says that humans are such machines. Per Searle, if you want to build a system that has subjective experiences of consciousness and understanding, it would have to have physical parts that correspond to some degree to the physical parts that give rise to our subjective experiences (or an animal's subjective experiences). It couldn't be a list of instructions to be executed. I don't know if Searle is right about this but I find myself unable to dismiss his argument as obviously wrong.
        simonh 5y ago
        You don't think it's obvious that actual computers and robots have physical parts? I'm sorry, I'm at a loss.
- tigen 5y ago
  > 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. Who says the computer doesn't understand Chinese, though? In this case "the computer" is the system. The program, being the code, isn't a process. The man is acting as a mechanical piece of hardware. But the computer running the program is an active process with state. I heard a lecture by Searle on this. He mentioned the idea that "the room understands Chinese" and simply dismissed it as absurd without considering it. This is exactly the problem with his argument. Well, that and the casual conflation of the man with the computer as if the CPU hardware is the system.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Right, exactly, it is absurd to think one man in a room with some symbols can generate understanding. But only because of scale, because we imagine a regular sized room, a normal sized book and a table with symbols on it. But it’s absurd because that system is incredibly simple, not due to any actual argument from fundamentals.