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It’s a large survey of academic philosophers on famous philosophical arguments. In this case, the question is asking whether philosophers agree with Searle and
by emp17344 6mo ago
It’s a large survey of academic philosophers on famous philosophical arguments. In this case, the question is asking whether philosophers agree with Searle and believe the Chinese room does not understand Chinese, or disagree with Searle and believe the room does understand Chinese.
- Kim_Bruning 6mo agoI actually agree that the room does not understand chinese too; because that's the only possible thing that could happen in real life. That doesn't mean I agree with Searle though! It depends on how the question is asked. Again, the wording is very terse so I can't determine what the people thought they were answering. Possibly you have a better insight?
- emp17344 6mo agoI think you’re possibly a bit confused… accepting Searle’s intuition on this thought experiment is agreeing with Searle. In light of this, I don’t understand your comment.
- Kim_Bruning 6mo agoThe intuition pump surely works just fine as an intuition pump. But from a purely scientific view: if you were to try to stage it as an actual scientific experiment it fails to hold up. No control (there's just the one room), no single or double blind (the researcher self-reports) , and badly defined elements (the contents of the notebook are not specified). Of course you reach the conclusion that room doesn't understand. Compare to Turings imitation game experiment: Two participants (principal and control if you will), Double blind (they're in closed rooms so the judges can't see them), and you can have multiple people doing the scoring. We can conduct this IRL, and in fact if you've used IRC or discord, it's almost a natural experiment there. Looking at it as a scientific experiment isn't so strange, Searle is responding to an executable experiment with an intuition pump. Why should the latter win? Note that there are many ways to cut this, but this is one of mine.