Comment by Kim_Bruning
11 hours ago
Oh, I've always wanted to debate him about the chinese room. I disagree with him, passionately. And that's the most fun debate to have. Especially when it's someone who is actually really skilled and knowledgeable and nuanced!
Maybe I should look up some of my other heroes and heretics while I have the chance. I mean, you don't need to cold e-mail them a challenge. Sometimes they're already known to be at events and such, after all!
Searle has written responses to dozens of replies to the Chinese Room. It's likely that you can find his rebuttals to your objection in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the Chinese Room, or deeper in a source in the bibliography. Is your rebuttal listed here?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room
> In response to this, Searle argues that it makes no difference. He suggests a variation on the brain simulator scenario: suppose that in the room the man has a huge set of valves and water pipes, in the same arrangement as the neurons in a native Chinese speaker’s brain. The program now tells the man which valves to open in response to input. Searle claims that it is obvious that there would be no understanding of Chinese.
I mean, I guess all arguments eventually boil down to something which is "obvious" to one person to mean A, and "obvious" to me to mean B.
Same. I feel the Chinese room argument is a nice thing to clarify thinking.
Two systems, one feels intuitively like it understands, one doesn’t. But the two systems are functionally identical.
Therefore either my concept of “understanding” is broken, my intuition is wrong, or the concept as a whole is not useful at the edges.
I think it’s the last one. If a bunch of valves can’t understand but a bunch of chemicals and electrical signals can if it’s in someone’s head then I am simply applying “does it seem like biology” as part of the definition and can therefore ignore it entirely when considering machines or programs.
Searle seems to just go the other way and I don’t under Why.
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All you have to do is train an LLM on the collected works and letters of John Searle; you could then pass your arguments along to the machine and out would come John Searle's thoughtful response...
Something that would resemble 'John Searle's thoughtful response'...
I'll posit that the distinction does not matter: the whole Chinese Room line of discourse has been counterproductive to putting in actual work.
I don't think John Searle would agree.
You're absolutely right!