Re:Searle's Chinese Room Argument
by jfengel on Thursday May 04, 2023 @01:06PM
(#35818711)
He proves that you can't necessarily derive semantics from syntax alone.
You don't need a whole room to do that, though. You already know that a sentence can be semantically ambiguous, with multiple distinct readings that can be resolved with context.
A Turing machine is distinct from a lookup table. It has a memory. Of course a lookup table doesn't "speak Chinese", but that's not a question anybody was asking.
It feels like Searle is trying to confuse your intuition: if you can look inside and see the mechanics then there can't be any "qualia" there. But the mechanics he's proposing simply do not work, so the question is moot.
I think the grandparent post is on the right track: the question Searle should have been asking is closer to one about P-zombies. The question he's actually asking isn't worth discussing, because the intuition he's pumping isn't about computationalism at all.
You don't need a whole room to do that, though. You already know that a sentence can be semantically ambiguous, with multiple distinct readings that can be resolved with context.
A Turing machine is distinct from a lookup table. It has a memory. Of course a lookup table doesn't "speak Chinese", but that's not a question anybody was asking.
It feels like Searle is trying to confuse your intuition: if you can look inside and see the mechanics then there can't be any "qualia" there. But the mechanics he's proposing simply do not work, so the question is moot.
I think the grandparent post is on the right track: the question Searle should have been asking is closer to one about P-zombies. The question he's actually asking isn't worth discussing, because the intuition he's pumping isn't about computationalism at all.