[2016-11-12] John Searle's Chinese Room

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Astrogirl
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[2016-11-12] John Searle's Chinese Room

Post by Astrogirl »

Microaggression? Microaggression!

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Re: [2016-11-12] John Searle's Chinese Room

Post by Thisfox »

I'm stumped too.

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Re: [2016-11-12] John Searle's Chinese Room

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MeisterKleister
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Re: [2016-11-12] John Searle's Chinese Room

Post by MeisterKleister »

"The Chinese Room" thought experiment is a famous argument by philosopher John Searle against the possibility of "strong" (conscious) AI.

It goes something like this:
You are locked inside a room which is part of a system that passes the Turing test in Chinese (ie. some Chinese guy is chatting with you via text thinking you're a genuine Chinese speaker).
But in fact you're just using a set of (presumably unimaginably complex) rules to process the Chinese letters and output a coherent response. You don't understand any of the Chinese, therefore there is no understanding of Chinese and no consciousness in the Chinese room.

I think the rebuttal is pretty simple: the system itself does "understand" Chinese. And this "understanding" would be indistinguishable from human understanding in every practical sense.

Related comic strip:
Image

For more see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Last edited by MeisterKleister on Fri Nov 18, 2016 8:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: [2016-11-12] John Searle's Chinese Room

Post by GollyRojer »

What he thought was a Chinese room actually belonged to a guy named Schrödinger.

Billie34

Re: [2016-11-12] John Searle's Chinese Room

Post by Billie34 »

Strong AI, according to Searle, "the computer is not only a tool in the study of the mind, but the properly designed computer truly is a mind in the sense that computers with the right programs can word wipe literally be said to understand and have other cognitive states."

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