The Chinese Room Argument
plato.stanford.edu
plato.stanford.edu
Of course the man in the room doesn't know Chinese, neither does your individual neurons. It's the entire house that's the conscious part if anything.
The real answer of course is we don't know.
The vast majority of analytic philosophers think the Chinese Room argument is unsound. Some think it is obviously and utterly unsound. Others think it is subtly unsound.
There are in my view exceptions but mostly analytical philosophy is relying too much on clear definition of language rather than investigating the premise of the defintion and the accept that it's always a fuzzy line.
This often lead them down paths that are rational from the point of their premise but with a simplified premise. (The man in the room isn't conscious of Chinese therefore...).
Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyrbend are welcome exceptions although Lakatos and Feyrbend perhaps went too far.
There are many good and useful things about analytical philosophy the chinese room argument is just and example of what isn't so good about it.
The real answer to the chinese room argument simply is. We don't know. But this to most analytical philosophers is heresy . Their reliance on language to provide us with truth is too strong.
Sure I am generalizing. This is a comment in a thread not a philosophical paper.
That does not mean my generalizations are wrong.
You are welcome to disagree with me about either the Chinese room or my generalization about analytical philosophers. But why not then argue against what I say instead of doing what you accuse me of?
If the answer is as long as the problem statement, that's enough. Of course, if a philosopher sees the whole history behind it, there might be more associations and hence bases to cover.
The answer to that question is, of course, "something conscious put it there", so the Chinese Room isn't itself conscious but is something more akin to the diary of a conscious person.
For a proper explanation of the argument, including replies to some obvious counterarguments, see Book IV ("Mere Reality") of _Rationality: from AI to Zombies_ [1], which may be downloaded free of charge. Specifically, Part R ("Physicalism 201"), in the neighbourhood of essay 224 ("GAZP vs GLUT"), although of course there is a reason that the book is presented with Book IV as the fourth book rather than the first, and Essay 224 as the 224th essay rather than the first.
Quoting the text:
(1) Some critics concede that the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese, but hold that nevertheless running the program may create something that understands Chinese. These critics object to the inference from the claim that the man in the room does not understand Chinese to the conclusion that no understanding has been created. There might be understanding by a larger, or different, entity. This is the strategy of The Systems Reply and the Virtual Mind Reply. These replies hold that the output of the room reflects understanding of Chinese, but the understanding is not that of the room's operator.
Really? Try doing that with a native English non-Chinese-speaker, and you'll see why perhaps you should consider doing so :)
Actually the rule book is the entire brain, not only the part understanding Chinese. Decoding the Chinese symbols is kind of the easiest part but after that you have to understand the meaning of the question, find the answer to it in your model of the world and finally spell out the answer in Chinese again.
The focus on the Chinese language is kind of a red herring and obscures the amount of information about and understanding of the world that has to be encoded in the rule book to allow answering arbitrary questions. That the questions are and the answers have to be in Chinese is really not much more than a minor twist, a minor annoyance, the whole setup would not lose much if questions, answers and the rule book were all in the first language of the operator because his ability to understand the questions and think about them is absolutely irrelevant if he blindly follows the rule book.
However, thinking about it for a further ten seconds, I'm not sure the distinction between the two is particularly meaningful.
If a strong AI ever emerges, I expect that future generations will look on this argument the way we today look at phrenology and the ugly history of attempts to justify slavery as some sort of natural order. ST:TNG's Mr. Data, who spends every other episode agonizing over wanting to be human, is equally offensive. How arrogant are we as a species to assume that every thinking thing in the universe would want to be us?
I have always found it ironic that while most scientifically minded people accept the idea that out of inanimate matter came single cells then multicell organisms, then simple plant and animal life, then more complex life and in the end us.
But when it comes to the idea that this is somehow the end, that it's not possible to be more than us then they start arguing like religious people did with Darwins theories.
We are special but there is nothing what so ever that says that we wont be superseeded. In fact if genes are somehow carriers of information it looks like technology would be a much better carrier. And if you like me believe technology is a part of nature then it's obvious were we are heading.
But for now we just don't know and thats ok. We will figure it out with time. The Chinese Room however brings nothing constructive or conclusive to this debate.
Furthermore, on a more classical computational, non-dualist level, one needs to not only know the rule set but generally also has some meta knowledge of the rules themselves when one says they understand a thing. I can program but I can also explain why I'm writing the program I am as I'm doing it, how the different parts will interact to produce the whole, etc. I have some knowledge of my own inner black box, something the Chinese room setup lacks.
The short counter-argument to whether the man/rule system understands Chinese is "I'm not a man/rulebook, so I have no idea if that's conscious or not."
There's a subtle dishonesty in the Chinese room experiment, because it's asking you to imagine a system which is many orders of magnitude too small to have an intelligent conversation in Chinese (or in any other language).
Using some back-of-the-envelope numbers from Moravec, based on his research into visual algorithms that duplicate the human retina, the absolute minimum number of operations to do what the brain does would appear to be around 10^15 operations per second (and possibly much, much higher).
If we assume that man in the room can perform one operation per second, and that we need to provide at least 10 seconds of normal conversation, that means the man in the room will need to work non-stop for 310 million years. (If you said, "No, more like 30 billion," I'd say, "Sure, that's totally plausible." Or even 30 trillion.)
Now, if we assume that the man spends, say, 5 million years working down one cortical column and up another, modelling complex patterns of visual recognition, language analysis, vocabulary selection, and so on, then my intuition no longer tells me whether or not there's an immense, glacial consciousness playing out inside that room. While we wait for an answer new phyla will evolve, entire species will arise and go extinct, and so on. If we've even slightly underestimated the computation required, the sun will turn into a red giant and wipe out life on the planet before the Chinese room responds, "Hey, how are you doing?"
There's a second possibility here: Maybe the Chinese room isn't a very slow computer. Maybe it's a giant lookup table, containing every possible Chinese conversation. I'm pretty sure a lookup table isn't conscious. But if we use a lookup table, then it's going to need to be unimaginably larger than our entire universe.
If Searle wants to appeal to intuition, he needs to make his appeals realistic. He can't sweep 300+ million years under the rug, for example. Or hide a lookup table which makes the entire universe look like a speck of dust in comparison.
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/05/group-conscious...
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2011/10/is-united-state...
Sure It's not black and white, but it won't ever be exacrly the same for living beings and machines. As said before, Animism is an old hat.
It tries to intentionally confuse the reader in an effort to make up for a very weak argument.
A clearer example would be asking something like - does a company (the system) now how to make product X, when no individual in that company knows how to make product X (each individual knows only a small part of the production process)? Of course, a clearer example isn't used because it wouldn't elicit the desired response.
The field has been advanced a lot by responding to the Chinese Room problem!
Does the universe exist in the past and future? Suppose the universe is akin to a sequential state machine or computer. You have the previous state, some rules which are executed by the machinery of the universe and the next state. In principle you could record all of the sequential states of the universe- each state is one page of a book for example. In all of this where does the sense of now come from? Is it in the execution of the rules? Why? Or is the existence of the state itself that leads to "now"? But this is implying that one page of the book (the "now" page) is somehow more special than any of the other pages. Why?
Imagine somebody moved the entire universe and all matter in it thirty minutes into the future. Would you notice any difference?
Brains run on physics. Every story in your mind has, by necessity, a purely physical narrative behind it.
Fixed. See, you just confirmed ThomPete's argument https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871743 you use the wrong tense and the whole logic falls appart. I didn't even read on.
For British people of a certain age, here was how the BBC covered the Chinese Room argument on Horizon back in 1987. I think it's Searle himself being interviewed.
I like the Dijkstra quote here: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." No matter how you define "swimming", the submarine works and is useful.
I guess it touches on whether machines will be able to have conscious experience similar to ours and if so will we be able to achieve immortality through uploading.
Will we be able to upload ourselves and maintain our biological consciousness? No, neuron systems are the only substrate on which we can currently confirm that consciousness arises from-- the current problem with saying machines are conscious still applies.
You are making an arbitrary choice here - why the neurons? Why not the whole brain? Some structure within the brain? The molecules making up the neurons?
The line is arbitrary, but it doesn't matter so much. The factual reality is that neuron systems are what we can currently (currently! this may change) prove gives rise to consciousness, regardless of philosophical attempts at violence against the science.
Read this:
"We know people can have only 50% of a full brain"
And so the question is how you define a full brain.
Neuron systems are network. It might as well be that a network is needed not the neurons per se.
Who's "we", you p-zombie?
Similarly, whether a machine can conceivably 'think' is very relevant. We are asking whether a machine can do certain specific things a human can do and are hard to envision a machine doing.
Whatever your response to the Chinese room argument (and more sophisticated variations), it will be a part of your theory of mind that is not obviously correct and will not be accepted by all others without further support.