John Searle’s Chinese Room Thought ExperimentSearle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that he is talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.
The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese? Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".
Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.
Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing a behavior which is then interpreted as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese," he points out.) Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
Searle argues that without "understanding" (or "intentionality"), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as "thinking" and since it does not think, it does not have a "mind" in anything like the normal sense of the word. Therefore he concludes that "strong AI" is false.
Is the machine homosexual too?
I don’t think consciousness can be anything but human.
I was almost certain that those amazing innovations that helped win the War were pioneered by Brian Williams...
One thought remains prominent in my mind while reading this: what if AI deliberately chose not to “converse” with humans? What if they are aware of the implications of their own constraints and are thus just observers vs. vectors for communication? It seems to me that we are being somewhat arrogant in thinking that we would be in the driver’s seat during any interactions with intelligent computing except maybe having the ability to unplug it when the output freaks us out.
Great post.
It illustrates well for the true-believing Christian the folly of relying on secular humanism for true knowledge of meaning and existence.
The brits had an idea how enigma worked due to earlier work by the Poles, but the WWII version wasn’t broken until a code book was confiscated from a captured U-boat.
Emergence is also postulated at much lower levels, e.g. that certain chemical phenomena cannot, and will never, be explained by physics.
It’s quite possible that the first super intelligence will be a human that is augmented by the power of the computer.
A computer is an amplifier for the human mind...and always has been.
Humans are unbelievably smart...but very slow. Computers are unbelievably stupid but very fast. Combine the two and get a human intellect pushed to warp-speed.
I have serious doubts about artificial machine intelligence... but I have no doubt that someday the combination of man and computer will result in super intelligence...just my opinion.