On 25 Jan 2014, at 15:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, January 25, 2014 1:41:30 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On 25 January 2014 00:26, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> 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?
NO ROOM CAN BE CONSCIOUS. NO BODY CAN BE CONSCIOUS. NO FORM CAN BE
CONSCIOUS.*
I agree.
*Except within the fictional narrative of a conscious experience.
Puppets can seem conscious. Doors, door-knobs, and Chinese rooms can
SEEM to be conscious.
You do the Searle error. The fact that the room/body form is not
conscious does not entail that the narrative is fictional. If the room
simulates the person at its right level, it can manifest the real
abstract person related to the narrative.
With your body or form is a sort of zombie. It does no more think than
a car. But the owner of the body can think, and use his body to
manifest his thinking (which is really "done" in platonia) relatively
to its most probable continuations in Platonia.
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?
Because humans are not human bodies.
We agree on this.
We don't have to doubt that humans are conscious, as to do so would
be to admit that we humans are the ones choosing to do the doubting
and therefore are a priori certainly conscious.
OK.
Bodies do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, since they remain
when we are personally unconscious or dear. That does not mean,
however, that our body is not itself composed on lower and lower
levels by microphenomenal experiences which only seem to us at the
macro level to be forms and functions....they are forms and
functions relative to our perceptual-relativistic distance from
their level of description. Since there is no distance between our
experience and ourselves, we experience ourselves in every way that
it can be experienced without being outside of itself, and are
therefore not limited to mathematical descriptions. The sole purpose
of mathematical descriptions are to generalize measurements - to
make phenomena distant and quantified.
No problem with this.
> 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.
You aren't listening to me - which may not be your fault. Your
psychological specialization may not permit you to see any other
possibility than the mereological argument that you keep turning to.
I don't argue for comp. I just invalidate your argument against comp.
It is circular. You always use your primitive notion of sense, which
makes no sense to me, except in segregating among the possible
creatures.
Of course the whole can have properties that the parts do not have,
that is not what I am denying at all. I am saying that there is no
explanation of the Chinese Room which requires that it understands
anything except one in which understanding itself is smuggled in
from the real world and attached to it arbitrarily on blind faith.
OK. That is why it is nice that incompleteness provides a bridge (the
Bp ==> Bp & p definition of Theaetetus) between the machine and the
real world (arithmetic). machines quickly realize that the
arithmetical reality kick back.
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,
Rooms don't understand anything. Rooms are walls with a roof. Walls
and roofs are planed matter. Matter is bonded molecules. Molecules
are sensory experiences frozen in some externalized perceptual gap.
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.
The conclusion is just the same if you use the room as a whole
instead of the person. You could have the book be a simulation of
John Wayne talking instead. No matter how great the collection of
John Wayne quotes, and how great a job the book does at imitating
what John Wayne would say, the room/computer/simulation cannot ever
become John Wayne.
Then there is something magical in John Wayne's body. What? Not a
first person soul, as machines have them too. It has to be something
noin Turing emulable, and not FPI recoverable, so what is it, and wy
postulating this for carbon based creature, and not silicon creature?
Bruno
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.
Tests are irrelevant, since the pass/fail standard can only be
subjective. There can never be a Turing test or a Voigh-Kampff test
which is objective, but there will always be tests which designers
of AI can use to identify the signature of their design.
Craig
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Stathis Papaioannou
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