The Chinese Room Argument

1. Overview

Computation is defined purely formally or syntactically, whereas minds have actual mental or semantic contents, and we cannot get from syntactical to the semantic just by having the syntactical operations and nothing else. a fancy robot might have dog level consciousness, desires, and beliefs...?

3. The Chinese Room Argument

  1. If Strong AI is true, then there is a program for Chinese, C, such that if any computing system runs C, that system thereby comes to understand Chinese.
  2. I could run C without thereby coming to understand Chinese.
  3. Therefore Strong AI is false.

4. Replies to the Chinese Room Argument

4.1 The Systems Reply

  • While the man running the program does not understand Chinese, the system as a whole does.
  • Searle: If the man memorized and internalized everything, he still wouldn't understand Chinese.

    • 4.1.1 The Virtual Mind Reply

  • A running system might create a distinct agent that understands Chinese.
  • This virtual agent would be distinct from both the room operator and the entire system.
  • Searle was considering Schank’s programs, which can only respond to a few questions about what happened in a restaurant?
  • In short, the Virtual Mind argument is that since the evidence that Searle provides that there is no understanding of Chinese was that he wouldn’t understand Chinese in the room, the Chinese Room Argument cannot refute a differently formulated equally strong AI claim, asserting the possibility of using a programmed digital computer to create a distinct mind that understands a natural language.
  • I agree. An ant colony or bee swarm are not intelligent

    • 4.2 The Robot Reply

  • a computer trapped in a computer room cannot understand language, or know what words mean
  • The Robot Reply holds that a computer with sensors and effectors, freed from the room, could attach meanings to symbols and actually understand natural language.
  • Hilary Putnam, 1981, Brain in a Vat
  • Searle: All the sensors can do is provide additional input to the computer and it will be just syntactic input.
  • Only Game in Town- the mind must work like a computer
  • CRTT- computational-representational theory of thought
  • Tim Crane, 1991, The Mechanical Mind- the man in the Chinese room would understand chinese as soon as he interacted with the world

    • 4.3 The Brain Simulator Reply

  • Searle- a bunch of valves and pipes are not a brain
  • Pylyshyn- if parts of a brain are replaced by circuits, it's still a brain
  • synron- artificial neuron
  • Searle agrees to this as long as you don’t know how it works.
  • The Luminous Room – someone waves a magnet and argues that the absence of visible light shows that Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory is false.
  • You can't understand brains by looking at neurons.
  • GOFAI – Good Old-Fashioned AI

    • 4.4 The Other Minds Reply

  • You can only determine if other folks understand Chinese by their behavior. So, if it quacks like a duck...
  • Searle – I know that folks have cognitive states.
  • we are taught language on the basis of our overt responses, not our cognitive states.
  • We can't tell the difference between zombies and non-zombies
  • Hans Moravec – Searle's traditional philosophy of mind is out of step with the new cognitive science

    • 4.5 The Intuition Reply

  • Ned Block – we need to change our intuitions about intelligence
    • Steven Pinker – Searle makes assumptions about the definition of understand.
  • Schank – computers don't understand hamburgers
  • Simon and Eisenstadt – easier to prove that AI understands things than brains
  • Dennett – A chinese room is slow; slow is stupid

    • 4.6 Advances in Artificial Intelligence

  • Sabine Hossenfelder – chatbots understand language the same way humans understand quantum mechanics
  • ChatGPT appears to understand that it doesn’t understand, but still contradicts itself.
  • locutionary suicide (e.g. “Here’s the answer to your question, but I don’t understand your question)