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Mar

2009

The Chinese Room Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/...chinese-room

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chinese-room 150

category-mistake comparable to treating the brain as the bearer, as opposed to the causal basis, of intelligence”
no way to attach “any meaning to the formal symbols”
29 more annotation(s)...
- a level-of-description fallacy.
- The claim at issue should be “the computer creates a mind that understands Chinese”
- distinguish between minds and their realizing physical systems
- the mental traits that constitute John Searle, his beliefs and desires, memories and personality traits—are all irrelevant and causally inert in producing the answers to the Chinese questions
- minds generally are more abstract than the systems that realize them
- understood what they are by relating them to things we do know by seeing, making, and tasting.
- agree with Searle that syntax and internal connections are insufficient for semantics, while holding that suitable causal connections with the world can provide content to the internal symbols.
- will be just syntactic input
- A computer might have propositional attitudes if it has the right causal connections to the world—but those are not ones mediated by a man sitting in the head of the robot.
- sure, Searle-in-the-room, or the room alone, cannot understand Chinese. But if you let the outside world have some impact on the room, meaning or ‘semantics' might begin to get a foothold. But of course, this concedes that thinking cannot be simply symbol manipulation.
- “The inherent procedural consequences of any computer program give it a toehold in semantics, where the semantics in question is not denotational, but causal.”
- symbolic functions must be grounded in “robotic” functions that connect a system with the world.
- They raise a parallel case of “The Luminous Room” where someone waves a magnet and argues that the absence of resulting visible light shows that Maxwell's electromagnetic theory is false.
- It depends on what level you take the functional units to be.
- Searle is right about Schank and symbolic-level processing systems, but holding that he is mistaken about connectionist systems.
- Dennett argues that “speed … is ‘of the essence’ for intelligence. If you can't figure out the relevant portions of the changing environment fast enough to fend for yourself, you are not practically intelligent, however complex you are”
- programs implemented by computers are just syntactical
- Computer operations are “formal” in that they respond only to the explicit form of the strings of symbols, not to the meaning of the symbols.
- On an alternative connectionist account, the computations are on “subsymbolic” states. If Searle is right, not only Strong AI but also these main approaches to understanding human cognition are misguided.
- a computer running a program is not the same as “syntax alone”. A computer is a causal system that changes state in accord with a program. The states are syntactically specified by programmers, but they are fundamentally states of a complex causal system embedded in the real world. This is quite different from the abstract formal systems that logicians study.
- “Searle's view, then, comes to this: take a material object (any material object) that does not have the power of causing mental phenomena; you cannot turn it in to an object that does have the power of producing mental phenomena simply by programming it—reorganizing the conditional dependencies of transitions between its states.”
- Computation, or syntax, is “observer-relative”, not an intrinsic feature of reality—“…you can assign a computational interpretation to anything”
- “This point is missed so often, it bears repeating: the syntactically specifiable objects over which computations are defined can and standardly do possess a semantics; it's just that the semantics is not involved in the specification.”
- operation symbols have meaning to a system
- Computers are complex causal engines, and syntactic descriptions are useful in order to structure the causal interconnections in the machine. AI programmers face many tough problems, but one can hold that they do not have to get semantics from syntax. If they are to get semantics, they must get it from causality.
- internalist
- a state of a physical system gets its semantics from causal connections to other states of the system
- Externalist
- original and derived intentionality

Dec

2010

Searle's Chinese Room Argument: Annotated Bibliography

host.uniroma3.it/...chinesebiblio.html

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chinese-room bibliography MBN Searle

May

2009

Distributing/Disturbing the Chinese Room

I think the Chinese Room is worth a second look not for the force of its argument but for what it reveals about contemporary ideas on what constitutes the essence of the human, especially intelligence, consciousness, and meaning. Excavating these and juxtaposing them with current controversies over the boundaries of the human will enable us to see what has changed, why it has changed, and what the change signifies in the decade and a half that has passed since Searle delivered the coup de grace that failed to deliver.

onthehuman.org/humannature

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Searle chinese-room AI 150 AZB grue cogsci MBN