But let’s say the room contains many billions of people, it is the size of a planet, and it contains racks of many trillions of symbols, and it spends millions or billions of years to produce an output. That’s more like the scale of a sophisticated computer system, or a brain.
Does that sound much like a man in a room with some symbols? No. Does it sound like that could do complex calculations and produce sophisticated and perhaps even intelligent outputs? Well, given enough time and scale, yes why not?
The Chinese room is pure misdirection and it amazes me anyone falls for it. There’s really no actual argument there.
Well, unless with dualism you just mean that there are two, you are simply mistaken. Just because my car has an inside and an outside, and I cannot determine the state of its gearbox from the outside w/o the car telling me, does not mean that this implies a ghost in the machine. Far from it.
He makes the analogy that a weather simulation in a computer can't make anything wet so therefore a computer program can't have a thought. My take is that when we think about rain we don't get wet either. Human minds are the same sort of thing as the weather simulation, not the same sort of thing as the weather. For me thoughts are simulations, or models, or operations on models, and that those activities are tractable to computation.
Doesn't that beg the question?
That's not at all what it says. It says:
1. Assume a computer program can pass a turing test
2. Convert the computer program into a list of steps that a human in a room can follow
3. Put a human in the room. Pass him a slip of paper with Chinese writing. Have him follow the steps to generate a response.
4. Now consider, once you've done this, does the human in the room following those steps understand Chinese?
Searle's answer is obviously not, from which he deduces that the computer program doesn't understand Chinese either.
By abstracting the system as a man in a room were distracted to think we’re considering the system when we’re not. If the man in the room is one of billions of men, at massive scale which is a more realistic model, that becomes obvious.
The thought experiment hinges on the concept of understanding. If you want to argue against Searle, and you can, your best bet is to attack that concept, to argue that "understanding" is an illusion or that it's nonsensical. This is what philosophers like Daniel Dennet have done.
Again with the scale misdirection. Are you really sure a room the size of Jupiter with a rule book the size of many libraries, full of trillions of people following the rules, shuffling quadrillions of symbols for millions of years definitely can’t ever understand Chinese? Not in any sense?
The thought experiment is about the concept of understanding/intelligence/consciousness/whatever. It has nothing to do with scale.
I’m bringing up scale because I’m pointing out how it’s being used.
But not John Searle...so it seems clear that scale has nothing to do with the thought experiment. For Searle, a vast room or an army of people to carry out instructions make no difference.
> Many of them seem to find it convincing that a man in a room with a book can’t “understand Chinese” when he personally doesn’t
The people who read the thought experiment this way don't understand it. In the thought experiment neither the computer program (no matter how powerful the computer is) nor the man and the room understand Chinese.
> But the only difference between them is scale.
No, the point of putting a man in the room is that we all agree that a human is capable of understanding. From his vantage point in the room, he can see that the program works by executing instructions without any understanding. All the room does is demystify a hypothetical computer program that can pass a turing test.
Searle is not arguing that a machine with understanding/consciousness is impossible. He's arguing against behavioralism ("if it can pass a turing test it understands"). He take the psychological phenomenon of "understanding" (something we're all familiar with) seriously, he thinks it represents a real thing, and that a computer that can pass a turing test doesn't necessarily have it.
Searle takes that experience seriously. For him it's real and, in order to have that experience, you need machinery somewhat similiar to what we have. He can't bring himself to believe that a list of instructions and a person dumbly executing them have that sensation of understanding even if they produce the correct output.
Neither does Searle. He says that humans are such machines. Per Searle, if you want to build a system that has subjective experiences of consciousness and understanding, it would have to have physical parts that correspond to some degree to the physical parts that give rise to our subjective experiences (or an animal's subjective experiences). It couldn't be a list of instructions to be executed.
I don't know if Searle is right about this but I find myself unable to dismiss his argument as obviously wrong.
Who says the computer doesn't understand Chinese, though? In this case "the computer" is the system. The program, being the code, isn't a process. The man is acting as a mechanical piece of hardware. But the computer running the program is an active process with state.
I heard a lecture by Searle on this. He mentioned the idea that "the room understands Chinese" and simply dismissed it as absurd without considering it. This is exactly the problem with his argument. Well, that and the casual conflation of the man with the computer as if the CPU hardware is the system.
Do you really think a blob of goo with static sputtering through it, designed by no one, accidentally mutated from pond slime, understands Chinese? I actually find your proposition easier to believe, but here we are.
It can respond to questions and explain its answers. Sometimes it's wrong, but so is a 7yo and you can usually understand why.
Is it intelligent? Maybe it is.
...Can we break it down and replicate it?
Can my sense of self be quantified?
What about animals, insects, viruses?
Is life unique, or an illusion too?
Or, are you the Chinese speaker, and the universe the room?
Would Searle feel differently if he'd taken a computer architecture course?
There was something strangely magic about making an adder:
1. Learn about boolean logic, Karnaugh maps, etc
2. Define the inputs and outputs of a 4-bit adder, deduce some set of gates which would correspond to those outputs
3. Put those into a circuit similator and put a box around it
4. Suddenly the random AND and OR gates, which look arbitrary and none of which individually know how to do addition, collectively know how to addition.
Then you keep scaling that up: Put a bunch of gates together, none of which have memory, and suddenly you have flip-flops and registers. Add an instruction decoder and suddenly it starts zooming along doing things, executing simple programs that you feed it from simulated "memory". But you know that inside is just a spider's nest of logic gates.
I myself am religious and believe in a spiritual world distinct from the material world; but the Chinese Room thought experiment was never that compelling to me: I've seen spider webs of logic gates come alive as processors when assembled properly; I don't see an inherent reason why an algorithm of paper plus a very patient human couldn't come together to create something which "understood".
This sort of reminds me of the people who claim the Big Bang is incoherent because we don’t know what came before it. Why is I don’t know not good enough?
The thing is this non material whatever can’t have properties. If it stores information, has state and has consistent behaviour then really it’s just a form of material (in the philosophical sense that it’s a part of the world), so it can’t have any of those. At which point, how does it even interact with the world at all? I mean if it influences the brain, then that mechanism of influence makes it part of the world, right? It makes it material.
That’s where I find the idea incoherent. I don’t see how it can be both immaterial but also have material effects. Doing so makes it material, I think by definition. It means it must be part of material reality in that sense. Or at least I’d like to hear an argument why it doesn’t.
"Non-material" just sounds like a bad label for material things we don't understand.
We don't understand how our cognition or consciousness works, but it seems silly to assume that because we don't understand we fundamentally can't understand.
People who push the mysterious interpretation of dualism are just trying to find a place for the divine that is separate from the material but in doing so they baselessly seek to circumscribe our capacity to understand.
If the extra thing dualism adds is just behaviours of matter, how is that different from materialism?
We say that we can experience thinking about an Apple, or imagining an Apple. I see no reason why a computer, or other physically implemented AGI system, could not do that. I suspect the act of imagination is just generating, processing and transforming a computational model abstracting the thing being imagined.
I believe brains are physical objects, so therefore physical objects can imagine Apples.
You can't touch fourier transforms either, but a human brain or a microchip can compute them.
I can make the computer imagine Quake for me, then fiddle with its plane of imagination for some sweet wallhacks.
Using vaguely-defined words to support a deist position is a time-honored tradition, but isn't particularly interesting or convincing.
A collection of neurons can build a model of the world that includes its experience of apples, and from that, dedicate some neurons to representing a particular instance of an apple. This model isn't the reality of "Apples", though, and is physically located in the brain.
Sure there is, that’s what DeepMind showed us with how to find cats in images :)
There exist many things many humans have lumped together under a single label such as "cat". Those categories are all wrong, but sometimes they're useful. Machines can also get in on the fun, just as well as humans, as you point out. There's no magic there, humans aren't special.
This has the benefit that it empirically fits how people think about it. Nobody thinks a rock has free will. Some people think animals have free will. Lots of people think humans have free will. This is everybody trying to smush a vague concept into the very simple, intuitive definition above.
Which is all to say that free will is about as relevant to any conversation as say astrology is: not one bit.
That there is something more than this. That it isn't just over. Something to keep people from giving up.
Edit: hope it didn't come off like I was talking down to people who believe what they believe. It's your life, it's your after life. Stay safe yall.
Even if dualism is true, and humans have something special, that doesn't mean that a paperclip optimizer is impossible. A paperclip optimizer would be very, very smart (in the sense of being able to solve problems and achieving its objective of turning the universe into paperclips), but would not have a consciousness.
However a lot of these people are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks when it comes to selling whatever quantum computing related tech or service they are working on. So it comes with a pile of skepticism from me. However the philosophical point of quantum computing being necessary if any of the “quantum dualist” type theories of consciousness turn out to be true.
The current state of physics suggests that we really have no idea what the "material" universe really is, at any scale. There may well be aspects of physical reality that we have yet to even conceive of. Given that when we cannot even say what a lump of rock is truly made of, or what even the dark void of space is made of, it should be obvious that we cannot be certain at all about what consciousness is made of.
Turing defined computation as I/O behavior. The Church–Turing Thesis states that as far as their I/O behavior is concerned, all sufficiently general computational mechanisms (computers) are equivalent. The Chinese Room Argument presents a stupid computational mechanism with I/O behavior equivalent to a human communicating in Chinese. Some people then conclude that because the Chinese Room is clearly not intelligent and "because all computers are equivalent", computers cannot be intelligent. But that requires leaving out the qualifications from the Church–Turing Thesis.
But maybe there is more to computers than their external I/O behavior. Maybe intelligence is a property of the internal behavior of a system rather than its external behavior. Then there could be some computers that are intelligent and others that are not, even if they have the same external behavior.
Searle is a materialist, pretty hardcore one at that. What he wanted to show with the Chinese room is that simulation of intelligence and intelligence are not the same thing, that a machine, or even a human for that matter, can perform symbol manipulation without having any internal understanding of the thing they perform.
It's an argument against functionalism (i.e. that a digital computer 'thinks' the same way as a human merely because it performs the same tasks), not an argument for dualism. (that mind and matter are ontologically dinstinct substances)
Just imagine a perfect rule book that already has a translation from one language into the other for every imaginable sentence, some native speakers just have written any possible combination down. You could 'translate' by just visually picking without having any idea of what's being said. They understand, you do not.
But where do you define what it is? "grasping what a symbol refers to" is another way of saying "understand" - it doesn't define what it means to "grasp".
That being said, the most recent philpeople survey has 52% accepting materialism compared to 32% accepting dualism with the rest undecided, so academic philosophy does generally lean toward AGI. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all