Imagine that also in the room is a triangle with four sides. Now the Chinese Room Argument disproves AI and geometry! What subject do you want to demolish next?
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 disagree with the specifics of his theory, but he did show that there was no way that people were learning sentences like parrots and repeating them. There had to be some computational / grammatical process.
Anybody can imagine mechanical alternatives for doing any information processing. To an extent, that drives the whole of the programming industry. The whole question of intelligence is that we can do it with a few pounds of biological material. Anything that doesn't address this is missing the point.
I don't believe it, can you show it?
So you think it's very obvious that it's impossible to build a chatbot that speaks chinese for 15 minutes in a computer like the one I'm using now (even one that claims to be a child for example). And why couldn't we just clone a Chinese person brain and say it's a computer? Why do you think a brain snapshot would require the size of a planet?
Ah, sorry, the "more elementary particles than the entire planet" claim wasn't made by me. My first comment was too vague, here is another try:
Yes, it sounds like a very strange claim, since isn't biological material made from elementary particles, and clearly you could fit someone who speaks Chinese into the room. Obviously that assumes that people are made of elementary particles, but if someone is going to argue that, I'm going to need a better definition of elementary particles to make any progress.
I thought Searle was asserting that a human mind can be simulated by a dumb program that only provided cached responses. It's easy to show there are more than 10e50 possible conversational paths in a 15 minute conversation (even a chess game has that many, and conversation is more complex than chess), and there are only 10e50 atoms on earth.
But it seems Searle's real argument was that the man inside the box is performing all the actions of an artificially intelligent computer program, just with pencil and paper. Humans clearly perform such actions with just a few pounds of brain matter. Even if the Chinese Room operator requires continent-wide resources, such difficulties don't address the essence of Searle's argument.
He seems to be asserting there's something special about the brain called "intentionality" which is unlike a computer running an algorithm. He might be right, but there seems to be no evidence for such a thing, or any way to prove that an entity which claimed "intentionality" didn't really have it.
Searle's thought experiment does inspire one of my own. Consider a computer that executes a sorting algorithm(mergesort, for example) on inputs consisting of sequences of number. Does it understand how to sort a sequence of numbers? What if a person uses mergesort manually to sort sequences of numbers? Does this person understand how to sort a sequence of numbers? Is there any fundamental difference between the understanding of a person who uses mergesort to sort sequences of numbers and that of a computer that uses mergesort to sort sequences of numbers?
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".
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.
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.