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Comment by erostrate | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this counterargument similar to the reply labelled (1) in part 4?

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.

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I don't think they are the same and that the idea mentioned by Smaug123 is not a refutation at all. A native Chinese speaker is also made and prepared by its parents and teachers and so on to understand Chinese but if you placed him in the room you would certainly not attribute its capability to understand the questions and reply to them to its parents and teachers, they past this capability to him and are no longer relevant. The same holds for the rule book, its creator codified his understanding of Chinese and the world in it but is itself no longer relevant. He is certainly not part of an entity that does the understanding in this setup because he has no knowledge of the questions past into the room and might as well be dead for a long time.

> you would certainly not attribute its capability to understand the questions and reply to them to its parents and teachers

Really? Try doing that with a native English non-Chinese-speaker, and you'll see why perhaps you should consider doing so :)

I am not sure which exact scenario you are suggesting but if someone taught me to understand Chinese he would of course be part of the reason why I can understand Chinese but he would not be involved in the process of understanding a question handed to me because I obviously retain this ability even after my teacher's death.

And so the book-person system retains the ability that was put in place by whoever made the book. I think that this counterargument to Chinese Room should be easy to understand for programmers - the book is just the "Chinese language understanding" part of the brain/knowledge refactored out. The rules of this mental experiment are vague enough to allow a rulebook that complicated.

[...] the book is just the "Chinese language understanding" part of the brain/knowledge refactored out.

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.

No, he shares knowledge with the questioner (beyond time, if that makes sense), hence he implicitly had probable knowledge of the questions.

It's similar, but I thought on my first read-through that they weren't quite the same. I read the Systems Reply as "understanding arises ex nihilo in the entire system"; the LessWrong reply is that "understanding is copied from somewhere else and coded into the system".

However, thinking about it for a further ten seconds, I'm not sure the distinction between the two is particularly meaningful.

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