Comment by drdeca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drdeca | Hacker News Reader

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Huh? How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese? Memorizing instructions to the point that one can mentally follow them doesn’t imply understanding why they work. If the person doesn’t understand the correspondence between the Chinese written words and things in the external world, then surely they don’t understand Chinese in the sense we generally mean when we talk about whether a person understands Chinese. (I think this is related to the robot reply?)

That’s not to say that I think the Chinese Room Argument is convincing. I don’t think it is. Or, I guess it might demonstrate something, but not what it aims to show.

I would argue that if, say, the person who has memorized this program and mentally executes it, and if this program also includes actuating some levers to control a mech or something, and the program (running via the person mentally going through the instructions by rote) takes actions to pursue some goals (e.g. purchasing some wood by conversing in Chinese and building a tower with that wood), while the person on whom the program is running wouldn’t know how to order a cheeseburger in Chinese,

Then, the program running in that person’s head might well understand Chinese even though the person doesn’t. (Whether or not the program actually understands Chinese, I think probably depends on the specific of the program in ways that I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t expect that any program that would understand could be small enough that a human person could memorize it and execute it by rote in this way, but this is a thought experiment and such issues can be disregarded I think.)

The point is that Searle's entire exercise is to show that there can be execution without understanding, and he does this by creating an agent whose only purpose is blind execution of rules. Since this agent doesn't have the understanding, there must be no understanding.

Critics immediately point out: yes, there clearly is still understanding, it's just in the system itself -- the program. The fact that the person does not have the understanding doesn't mean the understanding is gone.

His response to this is: but what if the system was the person's brain!?

Okay, so either it doesn't address the criticism at all (there is still a system of rules that contains the understanding; who cares whether that system is internal or external to the person's brain?) or it completely destroys the original premise of the argument, which is that the understanding is not in the person! You can't put the understanding back in the human agent and still claim the human doesn't understand what they're doing! His entire argument relies on the fact that the human agent obviously doesn't understand Chinese, and then says, actually, their brain contains everything it needs to know to have completely fluent conversations in Chinese. So the person does understand Chinese!

> How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese?

How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?

>How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?

Notice that the man while having memorized the rulebook can't convey any fact of his childhood in Chinese. He can only convey facts encoded in the rulebook, perhaps of a hypothetical childhood. The point is there are different ways information is stored in the brain; one way is through rote memory, the other is something like semantic memory. The rulebook encoded as rote memory doesn't endow his semantic memory contact with the meaning of the symbols. Hence the man doesn't understand Chinese.

This doesn't render the Chinese argument successful. The system's reply still stands when understood properly. I like to call it the virtual mind objection. Physically executing the rules in the rulebook just instantiates a virtual mind. Whether the man is reading the rules from the book or just pulling them from memory is irrelevant.

> How does it not!?

Because they can’t use Chinese to speak about things they encounter in the world?

Like, someone asks them in Chinese whether they are hungry and want some food, and they answer based on the program, not based on whether they are actually hungry, because they don’t understand the words in a way that lets them use them as a person who understood Chinese would.

Again, I don’t mean to say that in such a situation that there is no understanding of Chinese happening in their head, only that this doesn’t constitute that person understanding Chinese.

It seems to me very strange to want to say that the person with the simulation in their head understands Chinese. They can’t do the things that understanding Chinese lets people do.

Perhaps the program the person has running in their head is even a person, a moral patient and a moral agent, and one who understands Chinese. But the person who is running (by rote) the program, doesn’t thereby understand Chinese. They may “contain understanding of Chinese”. The understanding is definitely happening in their brain. But they don’t understand Chinese.

> How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese.

They don't, they have simply memorised a translation function which takes Chinese as input and returns Chinese as output. They don't have facts or information about the Chinese language - they don't even need to know what language they are speaking!

When the person reads 汉堡包, do they understand what that is?

Assuming you don't speak Mandarin, do you understand that word? If not, how could you claim to understand Mandarin? Even if you could use the translation function to speak it, you still don't understand it. Remember that the translation function is Mandarin -> Mandarin, so if you don't understand Mandarin you cannot use it to gain an understanding of the word.

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