Terren Suydam wrote:
... Without an internal sense of meaning, symbols passed to the AI are simply arbitrary data to be manipulated. John Searle's Chinese Room (see Wikipedia) argument effectively shows why manipulation of ungrounded symbols is nothing but raw computation with no understanding of the symbols in question.
Searle's Chinese Room argument is one of those things that makes me wonder if I'm living in the same (real or virtual) reality as everyone else. Everyone seems to take it very seriously, but to me, it seems like a transparently meaningless argument.
It's equivalent to saying that understanding cannot be decomposed; that you don't get understanding (the external perspective) without using understanding (the person or computer inside the room). I don't see any reason why this should be true. How to do it is what AI research is all about.
To look at it another way, it seems to me that the Chinese Room is exactly equivalent to saying "AI is impossible." Until we actually get AI working, I can't really disprove that statement, but there's no reason I should accept it either.
Yet smarter people than I seem to take the Chinese Room completely seriously, so maybe I'm just not seeing it.
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