Re:The singularity is close?
by agency on Thursday March 31, 2022 @09:00PM
(#30874077)
It seems like the Chinese room argument is incompatible with a materialist world view. To a materialist, what could the brain be but a computer? Some sort of physical process is taking place inside that is is processing information, and at some level of abstraction that process will look like "dumb" symbolic manipulation. Yet we achieve "understanding"
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Re:The singularity is close?
by colinmhayes on Thursday March 31, 2022 @09:12PM
(#30874141)
Yes that is the point. The Chinese room is a thought experiment meant to prove dualism.
No it's not. Searle is explicitly not a dualist.
He thinks conciseness is a physical property. It's not clear to me why he thinks only brains, or maybe only living things, can have this property.
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.
Re:The singularity is close?
by staticman2 on Friday April 01, 2022 @09:30AM
(#30877866)
Nothing about materialism implies lumping organic and inorganic substances into a catchall term "computer" leads to greater understanding of how either works.