Valentina Poletti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
Great point! Suppose that the rules of the room include the ability to translate the conversations into English and the rules occasionally do this. The man inside the room could eventually learn to understand the Chinese language. Does this prove that if the rules include Chinese to English translations that rule-based systems and computers can think? Only by examining a problem from different vantage points, and questioning how these new insights are relevant to a problem, can greater understanding of the problem can emerge. The over reliance on an initial reaction to a problem or a stock solution method may be indicative of a tendency to see everything only in the terms of the initial presumptions that one brings to the study. The question of whether a computer program, which only follows instructions, can ever exhibit free-will, has to be seen in the unpredictability, potentiality and sheer range of possibilities that interactive learning can produce. An accurate prediction of how the program will react at a later point cannot always (or even usually) be determined because the program can learn something new in that time. And because of the immense number of possible reactions that are feasible for a computer program, it is doubtful that anyone could actually make an accurate and precise prediction of what an intelligent program would do in the next few minutes even if it didn't learn something new. So even though the program may not show free will in the simplistic sense according to some presumption of what free will is, it can show an immense range of actions that may be quite insightful about the IO data environment which is operates in. An AGI program is both deterministic and non-deterministic relative to precision and future range of a prediction about what the program will do. And the Chinese Room problem, while interesting, cannot be interpreted by a simple presumption about it. Jim Bromer On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 6:18 AM, Valentina Poletti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- 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
