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Furcas comments on S.E.A.R.L.E's COBOL room - Less Wrong Discussion

29 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 01 February 2013 08:29PM

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Tags: ai philosophy consciousness chinese_room

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Comment author: Furcas 02 February 2013 01:06:17AM *  3 points [-]

Searle's main argument is this: sophistication of computation does not by itself lead to understanding. That is, just because a computer is doing something that a human could not do without understanding does not mean the computer must be understanding it as well. It is very hard to argue against this, which is why the Chinese room argument has stuck around for so long.

Searle is of the opinion that if we can find the 'mechanism' of understanding in the brain and replicate it in the computer, the computer can understand as well.

To get down to the nuts and bolts of the argument, he maintains that a precise molecular-level simulation of a human brain would be able to understand, but a computer that just happened to act intelligent might not be able to.

If that's what the Chinese Room argument says, then:

1) Either my reading comprehension is awful or Searle is awful at making himself understood.

2) Searle is so obviously right that I wonder why he bothered to create his argument.

Comment author: passive_fist 02 February 2013 03:41:00AM 3 points [-]

Searle is awful at making himself understood.

Perhaps a little bit of that and a little bit of the hordes of misguided people misunderstanding his arguments and then spreading their own misinformation around. And not to mention the opportunists who sieze at the argument as a way to defend their own pseudoscientific beliefs. That was, in part, why I didn't take his argument seriously at first. I had recieved it through second-hand sources.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 February 2013 06:49:56AM *  4 points [-]

(In my experience what happens in practice is his perspective is unconsciously conflated with mysterianism (maybe through slippery slope reasoning) which prompts rationalized flag-wavings-dressed-as-arguments that dog whistle 'we must heap lots of positive affect on Science, it works really well' or 'science doesn't have all the answers, we have to make room for [vague intuition about institutions that respect human dignity, or something]' depending.)

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