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The whole point of the argument is that the system doesn't understand Chinese. The system doesn't know what each sentence means, they don't evoke feelings, memo

The whole point of the argument is that the system doesn't understand Chinese. The system doesn't know what each sentence means, they don't evoke feelings, memories, images in the person in the room, there is no analysis, no agreement or disagreement with what is being said, it's just mechanical lookup.

ThomPete 12y ago
No the whole point of the argument is that the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese.
nbouscal 12y ago
And the reason the argument is absurd is that of course the room doesn't understand Chinese; it's a lookup table! No Chinese speaker interacting with the Chinese room for any reasonable period of time would think it held a Chinese speaker, because all it accepts are questions, and it answers the same question the same way every time. Of course, Searle would say that the set of rules in the room is defined to be such that a Chinese person would think they were interacting with a Chinese speaker, but the very setup of the system prevents this from being possible. The thought experiment is fundamentally incoherent.
- ajuc 12y ago
  I assumed the system has rewritable memory to remember previous questions, and the lookup is (all previous questions) -> next answer. With such setup (require infinite memory) the system is Turing-complete of course. If it works as you described it can't even answer "what was my n-th last question".
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
ajuc 12y ago
> The system doesn't know what each sentence means You can't prove that. For all possible experiments that can be performed we can construct system that will be indistinguishable from entity we accept as understanding Chinese. If you got atom-by-atom description of human brain without knowing beforehand what it is you wouldn't be able to reason that this brain understands Chinese, so why do you think you can judge other systems? > they don't evoke feelings, memories, images in the person in the room, We were speaking about understanding, not emotions, memories etc. Yes you can define "understanding" = being like me, but it's not fair definition, and would exclude a lot of people. And then of course you can't proove that there are no emotions and memories. They can be simulated by system as well. Even if you wanted lookup table - you would need to include writable memory so the system can rembmber previous questions when asked about them, at that point the system is self-modifiable and can be thought of as having memories and emotions. > there is no analysis, no agreement or disagreement with what is being said How do you know there's no analysis? If the system is complex enough you can't know what it does internaly. Or show me theory of consiousnes that can distinguish systems that can understand Chinese and can't basing on the specification of the system.
nova 12y ago
There's a very interesting discussion in Scott Aaronson's "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" (http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf). Briefly (as far as I understand), a lot of philosophical thought has been dedicated to computability, not enough to computational complexity, i.e., the resources needed for computation. A naive "lookup table" implementation of the Chinese room simply wouldn't fit in the Universe. You'd need to throw in a great amount of compression, and then you get something that could possibly be considered "intelligent" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize)

ThomPete 12y ago

No the whole point of the argument is that the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese.

nbouscal 12y ago

And the reason the argument is absurd is that of course the room doesn't understand Chinese; it's a lookup table! No Chinese speaker interacting with the Chinese room for any reasonable period of time would think it held a Chinese speaker, because all it accepts are questions, and it answers the same question the same way every time. Of course, Searle would say that the set of rules in the room is defined to be such that a Chinese person would think they were interacting with a Chinese speaker, but the very setup of the system prevents this from being possible. The thought experiment is fundamentally incoherent.

ajuc 12y ago
I assumed the system has rewritable memory to remember previous questions, and the lookup is (all previous questions) -> next answer. With such setup (require infinite memory) the system is Turing-complete of course. If it works as you described it can't even answer "what was my n-th last question".
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

ajuc 12y ago

> The system doesn't know what each sentence means You can't prove that. For all possible experiments that can be performed we can construct system that will be indistinguishable from entity we accept as understanding Chinese. If you got atom-by-atom description of human brain without knowing beforehand what it is you wouldn't be able to reason that this brain understands Chinese, so why do you think you can judge other systems? > they don't evoke feelings, memories, images in the person in the room, We were speaking about understanding, not emotions, memories etc. Yes you can define "understanding" = being like me, but it's not fair definition, and would exclude a lot of people. And then of course you can't proove that there are no emotions and memories. They can be simulated by system as well. Even if you wanted lookup table - you would need to include writable memory so the system can rembmber previous questions when asked about them, at that point the system is self-modifiable and can be thought of as having memories and emotions. > there is no analysis, no agreement or disagreement with what is being said How do you know there's no analysis? If the system is complex enough you can't know what it does internaly. Or show me theory of consiousnes that can distinguish systems that can understand Chinese and can't basing on the specification of the system.

nova 12y ago

There's a very interesting discussion in Scott Aaronson's "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" (http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf). Briefly (as far as I understand), a lot of philosophical thought has been dedicated to computability, not enough to computational complexity, i.e., the resources needed for computation. A naive "lookup table" implementation of the Chinese room simply wouldn't fit in the Universe. You'd need to throw in a great amount of compression, and then you get something that could possibly be considered "intelligent" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize)