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The Chinese Room Argument

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#31

Post by DrJokepu »

jerf wrote: post #22
camccann wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we don't have qualia and consciousness (it's just the illusion, that we have) An illusion experienced by whom? What's the difference between having an illusion of consciousness and having the real thing?

"What's the difference between having an illusion of consciousness and having the real thing?" Primarily, the word "illusion". At this point, having read up on these issues for a while, anytime I see the word "illusion" now I tend to just shut the book/leave the webpage/whatever. Have you ever, once, seen someone sit down and say what they mean by "illusion", or give a way of telling you how to distinguish between "i…

Whether consciousness is only illusion is of no consequence. This path of thoughts (just like Berkeley's subjective idealism or its modern form, the Matrix movie) ain't leading anywhere (besides madness) hence it can be classified as solipsism.

In my opinion, what matters that you experience consciousness, life, happiness or sadness. Have great meals, love the people who love you, do cool stuff as a 'hacker'. Your life will be as 'real' as it could get, whether it's an illusion or not.

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#32

Post by jeffcoat »

ekiru wrote: post #30
neilk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the only real objection to Searle. People get handwavey in these thought experiments, that we can just assume that such a system can be built. Well, no, we can't, not even in theory. It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet. There is an analogy here with Chomsky's linguistics. You can di…

What's wrong with the objection that, if you accept that any two universal Turing machines are equivalent in power, Searle's argument amounts to(letting P be "there exists an algorithm A such that any computing system executing A understand Chinese" and Q be "a human simulating a computing system executing the algorithm A understands Chinese") "Suppose P. It's obvious that ¬Q. Since P is equivalent to Q, P leads to a…

Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters.

It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling that if you were to have a conversation in Chinese by following mechanical instructions from a book, you still wouldn't "really understand" Chinese. All well and good, so far.

But there are enormous leaps from the Searle-scenario that's so appealing to your intuition to a machine powerful enough to hold a conversation. As a trivial example, the Chinese room cannot even simulate a Turing machine unless you give the person inside rather a lot of scratch paper.

You can keep countering objections like this by adding more stuff to the Room. So to hold a conversation about the weather, we'll need to add some separate input channels to observe the outside world, and to talk about the Room's plans for today, we'll need to throw in something that can keep track of time, .... it just goes on. (And while you're adding all the extra machinery, don't forget that even the original book is incalculably large, not the merely hefty tome that you're picturing in your mind's eye.)

As you do this, you get farther and farther away from the original appeal to your intuition. So far that your only hope of making sense is to acknowledge that your intuitions about the simplified situation has absolutely nothing to do with a Chinese Room powerful enough to actually meet the original stipulation, that the room can "pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese".

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#33

Post by ilaksh »

The field Searle is retardedly attempting to dismiss is now referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI), not AI.

Also, philosophers should try to realize that we have this thing called science now.

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#34

Post by gphil »

Esspe wrote: post #3
mindstab wrote: post #2

Seriously, why won't this 2+ decade old argument die? It's sophomoric and picked apart in second year cognitive systems classes by 19 year old children. It glaringly misunderstands and misrepresents. If people are genuinely interested in AI they should take a basic course in it at university or pick up a real book on the subject.

In my opinion, this argument have existential consequences: either it's not possible to emulate mind on turing machine or we don't have qualia and consciousness (it's just the illusion, that we have). And i don't like the latter.

Huh? How do you get from:

(1) It is possible to emulate the mind on a Turing Machine.

to:

(2) We don't have qualia or consciousness.

In my opinion, there's nothing about (1) that entails (2).

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#35

Post by dhume »

gphil wrote: post #34
Esspe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, this argument have existential consequences: either it's not possible to emulate mind on turing machine or we don't have qualia and consciousness (it's just the illusion, that we have). And i don't like the latter.

Huh? How do you get from: (1) It is possible to emulate the mind on a Turing Machine. to: (2) We don't have qualia or consciousness. In my opinion, there's nothing about (1) that entails (2).

According to the "Chinese room" argument, a machine is not capable of genuinely understanding a language (since it is only looking up and applying transformation rules). It is generally believed that a human can, so that would mean a human mind cannot be fully emulated by a Turing machine. The only alternative seems to be that a human actually has the same limitation as a Turing machine (non-consciousness) and does not really understand language either.

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#36

Post by dhume »

jeffcoat wrote: post #32
ekiru wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the objection that, if you accept that any two universal Turing machines are equivalent in power, Searle's argument amounts to(letting P be "there exists an algorithm A such that any computing system executing A understand Chinese" and Q be "a human simulating a computing system executing the algorithm A understands Chinese") "Suppose P. It's obvious that ¬Q. Since P is equivalent to Q, P leads to a…

Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters. It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling that if you were to have a conversation in Chinese by following mechanical instructions from a book, you still wouldn't "really understand" Chinese. All well and good, so far. But…

Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters.

Right, this discussion is imcomplete without bringing in Church's thesis.

* So to hold a conversation about the weather, we'll need to add some separate input channels to observe the outside world, and to talk about the Room's plans for today, we'll need to throw in something that can keep track of time, .... it just goes on.*

Or these could be predefined and static.

(And while you're adding all the extra machinery, don't forget that even the original book is incalculably large, not the merely hefty tome that you're picturing in your mind's eye.)

This is like objecting that a Turing machine would take too many steps to solve a sufficiently large instance of some problem (e.g. more than there are Planck times in the age of the universe). The problem is still Turing-computable.

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#37

Post by lg »

rms wrote: post #19

From my reading over the last few months, I think the unanswered question of subjective experience/qualia comes down to the Born Probabilities. http://lesswrong.com/lw/py/the_born_probabilities/

Thinking out loud here I guess, but I'd like to hear Eliezer's opinion on the interpretations of QM that do reconcile conscious experience with these probabilities in a way that doesn't require splitting worlds, like these: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0603027

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#38

Post by ekiru »

jeffcoat wrote: post #32
ekiru wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the objection that, if you accept that any two universal Turing machines are equivalent in power, Searle's argument amounts to(letting P be "there exists an algorithm A such that any computing system executing A understand Chinese" and Q be "a human simulating a computing system executing the algorithm A understands Chinese") "Suppose P. It's obvious that ¬Q. Since P is equivalent to Q, P leads to a…

Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters. It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling that if you were to have a conversation in Chinese by following mechanical instructions from a book, you still wouldn't "really understand" Chinese. All well and good, so far. But…

"Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters."

In what way is a hypothetical person using "a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program)" different from a universal Turing machine executing the same instructions? When Turing manually executed his computer chess program, how did this differ from having a computer execute it?

"It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling that if you were to have a conversation in Chinese by following mechanical instructions from a book, you still wouldn't "really understand" Chinese."

I fail to understand how this portion of what you're saying disagrees at all with what I said. I don't really see the rest of what you say as disagreeing with what I said, but it is at least not identical to it.

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#39

Post by lg »

tlb wrote: post #15

I think you could make the same argument for lots of things computers do. Could Grand Theft Auto 4, including the character AI and per-pixel 3D rendering, be implemented by people following instructions on cards? Yes, because Turing machines yadda yadda. But it's inconceivable to non-programmers. The Chinese room argument is convincing for the same reason: doing something AI-like requires billions of steps and non-pr…

Well, it's inconceivable to Searle.

Searle's problem is that, much as we can't imagine how silicon can be conscious, we can't imagine how squishy physical brains are capable of conscious experiences either, even though we know they are, because we are. His solution is that biological stuff just has these special properties, that's a "brute fact" about biological stuff and it's not true of silicon stuff. And I think most philosophers of mind (who are, by and large, nonprogrammers) think that's too 'magical' to be true.

In fact a very popular idea now in philosophy is that consciousness is (in some sense) a fundamental physical property, and when physical things are arranged in the right way, they become conscious like us or any other animal. And the proper arrangement of particles to invoke these high-level conscious properties must help organisms survive, or else it'd be unlikely that we have them. And so machines structured the right way can probably be conscious too.

Re: The Chinese Room Argument

#40

Post by Herring »

pvg wrote: post #25

Richard Gabriel has a nice write-up on this, well worth reading especially if you're in the sputtering 'zomg this is SO dumb' camp. It's also a much quicker read than the entirety of the Stanford page. http://www.dreamsongs.com/Searle.html "Searle's argument is subtle in a way that seems to confuse intelligent readers. "

> Most of the critics of Searle's argument fail to respond directly to his points. This is actually not all that surprising in that most of the critics are scientists and Searle's argument is philosophical, but it means that doing a point by point critique of the argument is unlikely to be very useful.

Well now, that says something about philosophy's relevance to science.

> Many people consider the concept of gender inseparable from its fleshly and biological origin and nature.

And many people don't. The argument is just philosophical, what's the big deal?

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