On 25 January 2014 00:26, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Tell me what you believe so we can be clear: >> >> My understanding is that you believe that if the parts of the Chinese >> Room don't understand Chinese, then the Chinese Room can't understand >> Chinese. Have I got this wrong? > > > The fact that the Chinese Room can't understand Chinese is not related to > its parts, but to the category error of the root assumption that forms and > functions can understand things. I see forms and functions as one of the > effects of experience, not as a cause of them. But that doesn't answer the question: do you think (or understand, or whatever you think the appropriate term is) that the Chinese Room COULD POSSIBLY be conscious or do you think that it COULD NOT POSSIBLY be conscious? Or do you claim that the question is meaningless, a category error (which ironically is a term beloved of positivists)? If the latter, how is it that the question can be meaningfully asked about humans but not the Chinese Room? > I like my examples better than the Chinese Room, because they are simpler: > > 1. I can type a password based on the keystrokes instead of the letters on > the keys. This way no part of the "system" needs to know the letters, > indeed, they could be removed altogether, thereby showing that data > processing does not require all of the qualia that can be associated with > it, and therefore it follows that data processing does not necessarily > produce any or all qualia. > > 2. The functional aspects of playing cards are unrelated to the suits, their > colors, the pictures of the royal cards, and the participation of the > players. No digital simulation of playing card games requires any aesthetic > qualities to simulate any card game. > > 3. The difference between a game like chess and a sport like basketball is > that in chess, the game has only to do with the difficulty for the human > intellect to compute all of the possibilities and prioritize them logically. > Sports have strategy as well, but they differ fundamentally in that the real > challenge of the game is the physical execution of the moves. A machine has > no feeling so it can never participate meaningfully in a sport. It doesn't > get tired or feel pain, it need not attempt to accomplish something that it > cannot accomplish, etc. If chess were a sport, completing each move would be > subject to the possibility of failure and surprise, and the end can never > result in checkmate, since there is always the chance of weaker pieces > getting lucky and overpowering the strong. There is no Cinderella Story in > real chess, the winning strategy always wins because there can be no > difference between theory and reality in an information-theoretic universe. How can you start a sentence "a machine has no feeling so..." and purport to discuss the question of whether a machine can have feeling? > So no, I do not "believe" this, I understand it. I do not think that the > Chinese Room is valid because wholes must be identical to their parts. The > Chinese Room is valid because it can (if you let it) illustrate that the > difference between understanding and processing is a difference in kind > rather than a difference in degree. Technically, it is a difference in kind > going one way (from the quantitative to the qualitative) and a difference in > degree going the other way. You can reduce a sport to a game (as in computer > basketball) but you can't turn a video game into a sport unless you bring in > hardware that is physical/aesthetic rather than programmatic. Which leads me > to: The Chinese Room argument is valid if it follows that if the parts of the system have no understanding then the system can have no understanding. It is pointed out (correctly) by Searle that the person in the room does not understand Chinese, from which he CONCLUDES that the room does not understand Chinese, and uses this conclusion to support the idea that the difference between understanding and processing is a difference in kind, so no matter how clever the computer or how convincing its behaviour it will never have understanding. I don't think your example with the typing is as good as the Chinese Room, because by changing the keys around a bit it would be obvious that there is no real understanding, while with the Chinese Room would be able to pass any test that a Chinese speaker could pass. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
