A Russian Story Antedating John Searle's Chinese Room | Hacker News Reader

A Russian Story Antedating John Searle's Chinese Room

hardproblem.ru

10 pointskhrm7 comments

I recall a soviet short film involving a turing test administered over CCTV (it even name checked Тьюринг), but neither yandex nor kinopoisk are helping. Late 60s early 70s? IIRC the institute scenes were in colour. Anyone have any leads?

Searle's Chinese Room is becoming very relevant. Personally, it's how I've been describing to non-technical friends the difference between ChatGPT and AGI.

It's fascinating how early this author got to these ideas!

The Chinese Room is a fallacious bait-and-switch argument that should stop being brought up. It, along with the Russian game from the TFA, don’t actually provide any insight - all they do is have the computer program be executed by humans instead of a classical computer, and then trick you by focusing on the humans. The “understanding” isn’t in the substrate but the program itself, and it doesn’t matter if it’s executed by transistors, vacuum tubes, relays or a human in a room with infinite amounts of pencils, paper, and time.

> Searle's Chinese Room is becoming very relevant.

It's been relevant to Philosophy of Mind and Strong AI circles of Computer Science ever since it was published in 1980. I can't recall who, but an academic quipped around 2010 that, paraphrasing, the last 30 years of discussions of Artificial Intelligence has been dominated by arguments trying to prove that Searle's Chinese Room is wrong.

"...by arguments proving Searle's Chinese Room wrong".

It was clearly fallacious from the outset; it presupposes mysticism, a dualistic reality. I'm genuinely shocked anybody's still talking about it.

Well put. The underlying debate is not do what extent machines are able to think like humans, but to what extent humans are merely organic machines. Or as you alluded to, more simply it is monism versus dualism. And dualism is just the generalization of the God of the gaps fallacy.

> more simply it is monism versus dualism

Monism is doing a awful lot of work in this hand wave. You'd only have to sit in on a college-level Philosophy of Mind course for a single semester to understand how silly your comment is.

The fact of the matter is there is no academic consensus on whether Searle's Chinese Room argument is wrong. But the number of arguments against it is always growing while Searle's responses to these arguments are getting less frequent.

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