Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

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If a human in the room is following simple rules, he's just using part of his body to play a _simple_ computer, not using the full brain capacity for understanding. That doesn't make it impossible to build a computer as complex as the brain that does everything the same way as the brain does it internally.

Saying humans can do something that could never be built artificially is, imho, magical thinking.

If you want to prove that computers can never "understand" like a human can, you would have to prove that nothing that we can ever build with our hands and doesn't involve biological cells can ever do the same things the human brain can.

> Now according to this nice computer-reductionalist view, anything which does any dance is understanding a language as long as it produces results which are indistinguishable from a human's responses

Who says that? More stuff inside is needed for understanding it, than just input and output. That doesn't stop a complex enough computer from doing that. The brain can do it (at least I experience mine can), so some other (even non-biological) network could too.

No, you don't understand: the conclusion of the Chinese room argument is precisely your statement "more stuff inside is needed for understanding it, than just input and output." That's precisely why consciousness is not a reduction to executing the proper computer program.

Maybe you're not clear on what computers are? I strongly encourage you to look up for example the definition of Turing machines. They do not have any "stuff inside"; they consist of a subset of mathematical functions from bitstrings to bitstrings,

    data NextMove s v = GoLeft s v | GoRight s v | Halt v
    newtype TuringMachine s v = TuringMachine (s -> v -> NextMove s v)

A Turing machine is a mathematical function, a subset of (s, [v]) -> [v] that can be generated by the above functions.

Mathematical functions are defined as pairs of inputs and outputs. There literally is no "stuff inside" them. They're just sets of (input, output) pairs satisfying left-uniqueness: if (i1, o1) and (i1, o2) are both in the function then o1 = o2 and they were the same pair all along.

Again, Searle is happy that our brains are computers and happy that our brains are conscious. But they are not conscious by virtue of running the right computer program with their computational aspects. In fact, getting you to compute something is relatively hard and unnatural, which is why computers are so great as calculators whereas it takes many years to teach humans the same.

Is the argument only about turing machines, or about any non-biological machine we could build? Turing machines don't include for example random generators nor parallelism, but we can build both of those. I'm talking about anything we could build.

I do not believe in something magical (unbuildable) that biological cells or human beings have, so with enough technology we could build something that understands just like the brain does. If the brain can do it, nothing stands in the way of something else doing it. Maybe the brain uses for example some quantum mechanics we don't yet fully understand, but we'll still be able to technically use it once we know how, it won't be magically limited to only human brains.

EDIT: ok if the argument is really only about turing machines and that is what is meant by "program", that should be indicated a bit more clearly imho, because computers are not turing machines (nor is the brain), they're less powerful in one way, yet have more features in other ways :)

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