Let me ask about a special case of this argument. Suppose now the book that the guy in the room holds is a chinese-teaching book for english speakers. The guy can read it for as long as he wishes, and can consult it in order to give the answers to the chinese speakers interacting with him.
In this situation, although the setting has not changed much physically speaking, the guy can be said to use his free will rather than a controlled approach to answer questions. But is that true? The amount of information exchanged is the same. The energy used is the same. The person believes his decision are now guided by free will, but truly they are still guided by the book: if the book gives him the wrong meaning of a word, he will make a mistake when answering a chinese speaker. So his free will is just an illusion. The main difference in this second context is that the contents of the book were transferred to the brain of the person, and these contents were compressed (rather than consulting each case for what to do, he has been taught general rules on what to do). The person has acquired understanding of chinese from the book? No, he has acquired *information* from the book. Information alone is not enough for understanding to exist. There must be energy processing it. By this definition a machine *can* understand. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
