7 ms·

Minds, brains, and programs (1980) [pdf]

103 points by measurablefunc 1y ago

jmkni 1y ago
Long read, I'm sure it's fascinating, will get through it in time Just Googling the author, he died last month sadly
- measurablefunc 1y ago
  It's the responses & counter-responses that are long. The actual article by Searle is only a few pages.
ogogmad 1y ago
[flagged]
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - BadThink6655321 1y ago
    Wnat about Gödel incompleteness? Comptuers aren't formal systems. Turing machines have no notion of truth. Their programs may. So a program can have M > N axioms in which case one of the N+1 axioms recognizes the truth that G ≡ ¬ Prov_S(⌜ G ⌝) because it was constructed to be true. Alternatively, construct a system that generates "truth" statements, subject to further verification. After all, some humans think that "Apollo never put men on the moon" is a true statement. As for intentionality, programs have intentionality.
  - oh_my_goodness 1y ago
    Mostly agree, but the Chinese Room doesn’t prove anything about whether the algorithm understands Chinese. It’s a bait and switch.
    - 31337Logic 1y ago
      The CRA proves that the algorithm by itself can never understand anything by virtue of solely symbol manipulation. Syntax, by itself, is insufficient to produce semantics.
      - mannykannot 1y ago
        It proves nothing, and has, in fact, been overtaken by events (see another of my replies [1]). As for its alleged conclusion, I love David Chalmers’ parody “Cakes are crumbly, recipes are syntactic, syntax is not sufficient for crumbliness, so implementation of a recipe is not sufficient for making a cake.” [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664226
        measurablefunc 1y ago
        Simulation of a recipe is not sufficient for crumbliness which is the only thing a computer can do at the end of the day. It can perform arithmetic operations & nothing else. If you know of a computer that can do more than boolean arithmetic then I'd like to see that computer & its implementation.
        mannykannot 1y ago
        Searle tries this approach against the 'simulation agument' in this paper (see page 423) and also elsewhere, saying "a simulation of a rainstorm will not get you wet" (similarly, Kastrup says "a simulation of a kidney won't pee on my desk"), to which one can reply "yet a simulation of an Enigma machine really will encode and decode messages." The thing is, minds interact with the outside world through information transmitted on the peripheral neural system, so the latter analogy is the relevant one here.
        oh_my_goodness 1y ago
        Mostly. Probably.
  - wk_end 1y ago
    > Gödel incompleteness I agree with your comment, FWIW - I have no idea what OP is trying to demonstrate - but to maybe suggest some context: Gödel incompleteness is a commonly suggested "proof" as to why computers can't be intelligent in the way that humans can, because (very very roughly) humans can "step out" of formal systems to escape the Gödel trap. Regardless of your feelings about AI it's a silly argument; I think possibly the popularizer of this line of thinking was Roger Penrose in "The Emperor's New Mind". I haven't re-read Searle since college but as far as I recall he never brings it up.
  - dang 1y ago
    You can't attack others like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Btw, it's particularly important not to do this when your argument is the correct one, since if you happen to be right, you end up discrediting the truth by posting like this, and that ends up hurting everybody. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
BadThink6655321 1y ago
A ridiculous argument. Turing machines don't know anything about the program they are executing. In fact, Turing machines don't "know" anything. Turing machines don't know how to fly a plane, translate a language, or play chess. The program does. And Searle puts the man in the room in the place of the Turing machine.
- wk_end 1y ago
  So what, in the analogy, would be the program? Surely it's not the printed rules, so I think you're making the "systems reply" - that the program that knows Chinese is some sort of metaphysical "system" that arises from the man using the rules - which is the first thing Searle tries to rebut. > let the individual internalize all of these elements of the system. He memorizes the rules in the ledger and the data banks of Chinese symbols, and he does all the calculations in his head. The individual then incorporates the entire system. There isn't anything at all to the system that he does not encompass. We can even get rid of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn't anything in the system that isn't in him. If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him. In other words, even if you put the man in place of everything, there's still a gap between mechanically manipulating symbols and actual understanding.
  - BadThink6655321 1y ago
    Only because "actual understanding" is ambiguously defined. Meaning is an association of A with B. Our brains have a large associative array with the symbols for the sound "dog" is associated with the image of "dog' which is associated with the behavior of "dog" which is associated with the feel of "dog", ... We associate the symbols for the word "hamburger" with the symbols for the taste of "hamburger", with ... We undersand something when our past associations match current inputs and can predict furture inputs.
    - siglesias 1y ago
      "Actual understanding" means you have a grounding for the word down to conscious experience and you have a sense of certainty about its associations. I don't understand "sweetness" because I competently use the word "sweet." I understand sweetness because I have a sense of it all the way down to the experience of sweetness AND the natural positive associations and feelings I have with it. There HAS to be some distinction between understanding all the way down to sensation and a competent or convincing deployment of that symbol without those sensations. If we think about how we "train" AI to "understand" sweetness, we're basically telling it when and when not to use that symbol in the context of other symbols (or visual inputs). We don't do this when we teach a child that word. The child has an inner experience he can associate with other tastes.
gradschool 1y ago
tl;dr: If a computer could have an intelligent conversation, then a person could manually execute the same program to the same effect, and since that person could do so without understanding the conversation, computers aren't sentient. Analogously, some day I might be on life support. The life support machines won't understand what I'm saying. Therefore I won't mean it.
- 31337Logic 1y ago
  Wow. That was remarkably way off base.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    I think it gets to the heart of the matter quite succinctly, but the more I see discussions on this the more I think that there's two viewpoints on this which just don't seem to overlap. (as in, I feel like people feel like the Chinese room is either obviously true or obviously false and there's not really an argument or elaboration on it that will change their minds).
generuso 1y ago
It all started with ELIZA. Although Weizenbaum, the author of the chatbot, always emphasized that the program was performing a rather simple manipulation of the input, mostly based on pattern matching and rephrasing, popular press completely overhyped the capabilities of the program, with some serious articles debating whether it would be a good substitute for psychiatrists, etc. So, many people, including Searle, wanted to push back on reading too much into what the program was doing. This was a completely justified reaction -- ELIZA simply lacked the complexity which is presumably required to implement anything resembling flexible understanding of conversation. That was the setting. In his original (in)famous article, Searle started with a great question, which went something like: "What is required for a machine to understand anything?" Unfortunately, instead of trying to sketch out what might be required for understanding, and what kinds of machines would have such facilities (which of course is very hard even now), he went into dazzling the readers with a "shocking" but a rather irrelevant story. This is how stage magicians operate -- they distract a member of the audience with some glaring nonsense, while stuffing their pockets with pigeons and handkerchiefs. That is what Searle did in his article -- "if a Turing Machine were implemented by a living person, the person would not understand a bit of the program that they were running! Oh my God! So shocking!" And yet this distracted just about everyone from the original question. Even now philosophers have two hundred different types of answers to Searle's article! Although one could and should have explained that ELIZA could not "think" or "understand" -- which was Searle's original motivation, this of course doesn't imply any kind of fundamental principle that no machine could ever think or understand -- after all, many people agree that biological brains are extremely complex, but nevertheless governed by the ordinary physics "machines". Searle himself was rather evasive regarding what exactly he wanted to say in this regard -- from what I understand, his position has evolved considerably over the years in response to criticism, but he avoided stating this clearly. In later years he was willing to admit that brains were machines, and that such machines could think and understand, but somehow he still believed that man-made computers could never implement a virtual brain.
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
Meaning bootstrapped consciousness, just ask dna and rna. I don't get any of these anthropocentric arguments, meaning predates humanity and consciousness, that's what dna is, meaning primitives are just state changes the same thing as physical primitives. syntactic meaning exists even without an interpreter in the same way physical "rock" structures existed before there were observers, it just picks up causal leverage when there is one. Only a stateless universe would have no meaning. Nothing doesn't exist, meaninglessness doesn't exist, these are just abstraction we've invented. Call it the logos if that's what you need, call it field pertubations, reality has just traveling up the meaning complexity chain, but complex meaning is just structural arrangement of meaning simples. Stars emit photons, humans emit complex meaning. Maybe we'll be part of the causal chain that solves entropy, until then we are the only empirically observed, random walk write heads of maximally complex meaning in the universe. We are super rare and special as far as we've empirically observed, doesn't mean we get our own weird metaphysical (if that even exists) carve out.
- marshfarm 1y ago
  There's much more meaning than can be loaded into statements, thoughts, etc. And conscious will is a post-hoc after effect. Any computer has far less access to the meaning load we experience since we don't compute thoughts, thoughts aren't about things, there is no content to thoughts, there are no references, representations, symbols, grammars, words in brains. Searle is only at the beginning of this refutation of computers, we're far more along now. It's just actions, syntax and space. Meaning is both an illusion and fantastically exponential. That contradiction has to be continually made correlational.
  - fellowniusmonk 1y ago
    meaning is an illusion? That's absurdly wrong, it's a performative contradiction to even say such a thing, you might not like semantic meaning but it, like information, physically exists, and even if you're a solipsist you can't deny state change, and state change is a meaning primitive, meaning primitives are one thing that must exist. this isn't woo, this is just empirical observation, and no one is capable of credibly denying state change.
31337Logic 1y ago
RIP John Searle, and thanks for all the fish.
musicale 1y ago
I've always thought that Searle's argument relied on misleading and/or tautological definitions, and I liked Nils Nilsson's rebuttal: "For the purposes that Searle has in mind, it is difficult to maintain a useful distinction between programs that multiply and programs that simulate programs that multiply. If a program behaves as if it were multiplying, most of us would say that it is, in fact, multiplying. For all I know, Searle may only be behaving as if he were thinking deeply about these matters. But, even though I disagree with him, his simulation is pretty good, so I’m willing to credit him with real thought." I also find Searle's rebuttal to the systems reply to be unconvincing: > If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him. Perhaps the overall argument is both more and less convincing in the age of LLMs, which are very good at translation and other tasks but still make seemingly obvious mistakes. I wonder (though I doubt) whether Searle might have been convinced if by following the instructions the operator of the room ended up creating, among other recognizable and tangible artifacts, an accurate scale model of the city of Beijing, and an account of its history, and refer to both in answering questions. (I might call this the "world model" reply.) In any case, I'm sad that Prof. Searle is no longer with us to argue with. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627
- tug2024 1y ago
  Searle’s argument is like a captain claiming his ship isn’t sailing because the compass is inside a cabin, not on deck. Nilsson points out: if the vessel moves as if it’s cutting through waves, most sailors would say it’s sailing. Even Searle’s “deep thought” may just be a convincing simulation, but the wake is real enough. The systems reply? Claiming the ship can’t navigate because the captain doesn’t understand the ropes feels like denying the ocean exists while staring at the harbor. In the age of LLMs, the seas are charted better than ever, yet storms of obvious mistakes and rows of confusion, misguided and misled folk still appear. Perhaps a model city of Beijing as old town, new streets, and maps can sway Searle readers in the 21st century! Alas, the old captain has sailed into the horizon, leaving the debate with the currents.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
emil-lp 1y ago
Related: John Searle has died (Oct 2025) 146 points, 216 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627
jedberg 1y ago
I knew this title looked familiar! It was required reading when I took Searle's course. I always thought it funny that CogSci majors (basically the AI major at Berkeley in the 90s) were required to take a course from a guy who strongly believed that computers can't think. It would be like making every STEM major take a religion course.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Not a bad idea, actually. Religion is a big deal and it can only help to know the basics of how it works. Some of the fanboi behavior common in tech is at least religion adjacent.
- countrymile 1y ago
  Not sure that equivalence works, cognitive science doesn't require that people believe that computers can think; and STEM doesn't require that people think of the world in a purely mechanistic way - e.g. historically, many scientists were looking for the rules of a lawgiver. Apologies if I'm misreading you here.
epixu 1y ago
What do you think of this thought experiment?https://publish.obsidian.md/offmark/The+Chinese+Room+by+John+Searle/The+Chinese+Broom https://publish.obsidian.md/offmark/The+Chinese+Room+by+John...
tug2024 1y ago
[dead]

jmkni 1y ago

Long read, I'm sure it's fascinating, will get through it in time Just Googling the author, he died last month sadly

measurablefunc 1y ago
It's the responses & counter-responses that are long. The actual article by Searle is only a few pages.

ogogmad 1y ago

[flagged]

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
[flagged]
- BadThink6655321 1y ago
  Wnat about Gödel incompleteness? Comptuers aren't formal systems. Turing machines have no notion of truth. Their programs may. So a program can have M > N axioms in which case one of the N+1 axioms recognizes the truth that G ≡ ¬ Prov_S(⌜ G ⌝) because it was constructed to be true. Alternatively, construct a system that generates "truth" statements, subject to further verification. After all, some humans think that "Apollo never put men on the moon" is a true statement. As for intentionality, programs have intentionality.
- oh_my_goodness 1y ago
  Mostly agree, but the Chinese Room doesn’t prove anything about whether the algorithm understands Chinese. It’s a bait and switch.
  - 31337Logic 1y ago
    The CRA proves that the algorithm by itself can never understand anything by virtue of solely symbol manipulation. Syntax, by itself, is insufficient to produce semantics.
    - mannykannot 1y ago
      It proves nothing, and has, in fact, been overtaken by events (see another of my replies [1]). As for its alleged conclusion, I love David Chalmers’ parody “Cakes are crumbly, recipes are syntactic, syntax is not sufficient for crumbliness, so implementation of a recipe is not sufficient for making a cake.” [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45664226
      - measurablefunc 1y ago
        Simulation of a recipe is not sufficient for crumbliness which is the only thing a computer can do at the end of the day. It can perform arithmetic operations & nothing else. If you know of a computer that can do more than boolean arithmetic then I'd like to see that computer & its implementation.
        mannykannot 1y ago
        Searle tries this approach against the 'simulation agument' in this paper (see page 423) and also elsewhere, saying "a simulation of a rainstorm will not get you wet" (similarly, Kastrup says "a simulation of a kidney won't pee on my desk"), to which one can reply "yet a simulation of an Enigma machine really will encode and decode messages." The thing is, minds interact with the outside world through information transmitted on the peripheral neural system, so the latter analogy is the relevant one here.
        oh_my_goodness 1y ago
        Mostly. Probably.
- wk_end 1y ago
  > Gödel incompleteness I agree with your comment, FWIW - I have no idea what OP is trying to demonstrate - but to maybe suggest some context: Gödel incompleteness is a commonly suggested "proof" as to why computers can't be intelligent in the way that humans can, because (very very roughly) humans can "step out" of formal systems to escape the Gödel trap. Regardless of your feelings about AI it's a silly argument; I think possibly the popularizer of this line of thinking was Roger Penrose in "The Emperor's New Mind". I haven't re-read Searle since college but as far as I recall he never brings it up.
- dang 1y ago
  You can't attack others like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Btw, it's particularly important not to do this when your argument is the correct one, since if you happen to be right, you end up discrediting the truth by posting like this, and that ends up hurting everybody. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

BadThink6655321 1y ago

A ridiculous argument. Turing machines don't know anything about the program they are executing. In fact, Turing machines don't "know" anything. Turing machines don't know how to fly a plane, translate a language, or play chess. The program does. And Searle puts the man in the room in the place of the Turing machine.

wk_end 1y ago
So what, in the analogy, would be the program? Surely it's not the printed rules, so I think you're making the "systems reply" - that the program that knows Chinese is some sort of metaphysical "system" that arises from the man using the rules - which is the first thing Searle tries to rebut. > let the individual internalize all of these elements of the system. He memorizes the rules in the ledger and the data banks of Chinese symbols, and he does all the calculations in his head. The individual then incorporates the entire system. There isn't anything at all to the system that he does not encompass. We can even get rid of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn't anything in the system that isn't in him. If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him. In other words, even if you put the man in place of everything, there's still a gap between mechanically manipulating symbols and actual understanding.
- BadThink6655321 1y ago
  Only because "actual understanding" is ambiguously defined. Meaning is an association of A with B. Our brains have a large associative array with the symbols for the sound "dog" is associated with the image of "dog' which is associated with the behavior of "dog" which is associated with the feel of "dog", ... We associate the symbols for the word "hamburger" with the symbols for the taste of "hamburger", with ... We undersand something when our past associations match current inputs and can predict furture inputs.
  - siglesias 1y ago
    "Actual understanding" means you have a grounding for the word down to conscious experience and you have a sense of certainty about its associations. I don't understand "sweetness" because I competently use the word "sweet." I understand sweetness because I have a sense of it all the way down to the experience of sweetness AND the natural positive associations and feelings I have with it. There HAS to be some distinction between understanding all the way down to sensation and a competent or convincing deployment of that symbol without those sensations. If we think about how we "train" AI to "understand" sweetness, we're basically telling it when and when not to use that symbol in the context of other symbols (or visual inputs). We don't do this when we teach a child that word. The child has an inner experience he can associate with other tastes.

gradschool 1y ago

tl;dr: If a computer could have an intelligent conversation, then a person could manually execute the same program to the same effect, and since that person could do so without understanding the conversation, computers aren't sentient. Analogously, some day I might be on life support. The life support machines won't understand what I'm saying. Therefore I won't mean it.

31337Logic 1y ago
Wow. That was remarkably way off base.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  I think it gets to the heart of the matter quite succinctly, but the more I see discussions on this the more I think that there's two viewpoints on this which just don't seem to overlap. (as in, I feel like people feel like the Chinese room is either obviously true or obviously false and there's not really an argument or elaboration on it that will change their minds).

generuso 1y ago

It all started with ELIZA. Although Weizenbaum, the author of the chatbot, always emphasized that the program was performing a rather simple manipulation of the input, mostly based on pattern matching and rephrasing, popular press completely overhyped the capabilities of the program, with some serious articles debating whether it would be a good substitute for psychiatrists, etc. So, many people, including Searle, wanted to push back on reading too much into what the program was doing. This was a completely justified reaction -- ELIZA simply lacked the complexity which is presumably required to implement anything resembling flexible understanding of conversation. That was the setting. In his original (in)famous article, Searle started with a great question, which went something like: "What is required for a machine to understand anything?" Unfortunately, instead of trying to sketch out what might be required for understanding, and what kinds of machines would have such facilities (which of course is very hard even now), he went into dazzling the readers with a "shocking" but a rather irrelevant story. This is how stage magicians operate -- they distract a member of the audience with some glaring nonsense, while stuffing their pockets with pigeons and handkerchiefs. That is what Searle did in his article -- "if a Turing Machine were implemented by a living person, the person would not understand a bit of the program that they were running! Oh my God! So shocking!" And yet this distracted just about everyone from the original question. Even now philosophers have two hundred different types of answers to Searle's article! Although one could and should have explained that ELIZA could not "think" or "understand" -- which was Searle's original motivation, this of course doesn't imply any kind of fundamental principle that no machine could ever think or understand -- after all, many people agree that biological brains are extremely complex, but nevertheless governed by the ordinary physics "machines". Searle himself was rather evasive regarding what exactly he wanted to say in this regard -- from what I understand, his position has evolved considerably over the years in response to criticism, but he avoided stating this clearly. In later years he was willing to admit that brains were machines, and that such machines could think and understand, but somehow he still believed that man-made computers could never implement a virtual brain.

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

Meaning bootstrapped consciousness, just ask dna and rna. I don't get any of these anthropocentric arguments, meaning predates humanity and consciousness, that's what dna is, meaning primitives are just state changes the same thing as physical primitives. syntactic meaning exists even without an interpreter in the same way physical "rock" structures existed before there were observers, it just picks up causal leverage when there is one. Only a stateless universe would have no meaning. Nothing doesn't exist, meaninglessness doesn't exist, these are just abstraction we've invented. Call it the logos if that's what you need, call it field pertubations, reality has just traveling up the meaning complexity chain, but complex meaning is just structural arrangement of meaning simples. Stars emit photons, humans emit complex meaning. Maybe we'll be part of the causal chain that solves entropy, until then we are the only empirically observed, random walk write heads of maximally complex meaning in the universe. We are super rare and special as far as we've empirically observed, doesn't mean we get our own weird metaphysical (if that even exists) carve out.

marshfarm 1y ago
There's much more meaning than can be loaded into statements, thoughts, etc. And conscious will is a post-hoc after effect. Any computer has far less access to the meaning load we experience since we don't compute thoughts, thoughts aren't about things, there is no content to thoughts, there are no references, representations, symbols, grammars, words in brains. Searle is only at the beginning of this refutation of computers, we're far more along now. It's just actions, syntax and space. Meaning is both an illusion and fantastically exponential. That contradiction has to be continually made correlational.
- fellowniusmonk 1y ago
  meaning is an illusion? That's absurdly wrong, it's a performative contradiction to even say such a thing, you might not like semantic meaning but it, like information, physically exists, and even if you're a solipsist you can't deny state change, and state change is a meaning primitive, meaning primitives are one thing that must exist. this isn't woo, this is just empirical observation, and no one is capable of credibly denying state change.

31337Logic 1y ago

RIP John Searle, and thanks for all the fish.

musicale 1y ago

I've always thought that Searle's argument relied on misleading and/or tautological definitions, and I liked Nils Nilsson's rebuttal: "For the purposes that Searle has in mind, it is difficult to maintain a useful distinction between programs that multiply and programs that simulate programs that multiply. If a program behaves as if it were multiplying, most of us would say that it is, in fact, multiplying. For all I know, Searle may only be behaving as if he were thinking deeply about these matters. But, even though I disagree with him, his simulation is pretty good, so I’m willing to credit him with real thought." I also find Searle's rebuttal to the systems reply to be unconvincing: > If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him. Perhaps the overall argument is both more and less convincing in the age of LLMs, which are very good at translation and other tasks but still make seemingly obvious mistakes. I wonder (though I doubt) whether Searle might have been convinced if by following the instructions the operator of the room ended up creating, among other recognizable and tangible artifacts, an accurate scale model of the city of Beijing, and an account of its history, and refer to both in answering questions. (I might call this the "world model" reply.) In any case, I'm sad that Prof. Searle is no longer with us to argue with. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627

tug2024 1y ago
Searle’s argument is like a captain claiming his ship isn’t sailing because the compass is inside a cabin, not on deck. Nilsson points out: if the vessel moves as if it’s cutting through waves, most sailors would say it’s sailing. Even Searle’s “deep thought” may just be a convincing simulation, but the wake is real enough. The systems reply? Claiming the ship can’t navigate because the captain doesn’t understand the ropes feels like denying the ocean exists while staring at the harbor. In the age of LLMs, the seas are charted better than ever, yet storms of obvious mistakes and rows of confusion, misguided and misled folk still appear. Perhaps a model city of Beijing as old town, new streets, and maps can sway Searle readers in the 21st century! Alas, the old captain has sailed into the horizon, leaving the debate with the currents.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

emil-lp 1y ago

Related: John Searle has died (Oct 2025) 146 points, 216 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45563627

jedberg 1y ago

I knew this title looked familiar! It was required reading when I took Searle's course. I always thought it funny that CogSci majors (basically the AI major at Berkeley in the 90s) were required to take a course from a guy who strongly believed that computers can't think. It would be like making every STEM major take a religion course.

actionfromafar 1y ago
Not a bad idea, actually. Religion is a big deal and it can only help to know the basics of how it works. Some of the fanboi behavior common in tech is at least religion adjacent.
countrymile 1y ago
Not sure that equivalence works, cognitive science doesn't require that people believe that computers can think; and STEM doesn't require that people think of the world in a purely mechanistic way - e.g. historically, many scientists were looking for the rules of a lawgiver. Apologies if I'm misreading you here.

epixu 1y ago

What do you think of this thought experiment?https://publish.obsidian.md/offmark/The+Chinese+Room+by+John+Searle/The+Chinese+Broom https://publish.obsidian.md/offmark/The+Chinese+Room+by+John...

tug2024 1y ago

[dead]