Comment by gcbirzan
2 years ago
What if I gave you the complete description of how the brain of a person that speaks both Chinese and English is organised, you could simulate what happens when that person reads Chinese after being told to translate to English. Does that mean that that person cannot translate from Chinese to English just because you could (in theory, of course) do it without speaking Chinese yourself?
Yes, the algorithm is much more complicated, and we obviously don't have the capacity to map a brain like that, but to imply that there's anything except the laws of physics that governs it is... well, not very scientific.
I never said the system couldn't translate Chinese to English, only that doesn't understand the meanings of the words it's translating, because they're ungrounded symbols. Words have meanings because they're about something. Searle never said a machine in principle couldn't understand, only that symbol manipulation isn't enough.
Obviously if we made something like Data from Star Trek, it would understand language.