Return to the Chinese Room
Posted on 02 September 2010
In an earlier article, I had this to say about the famous Chinese Room of Robert Searle:
Robert Searle asks the following question: suppose you had a room that could pass the Turing Test. Written questions in Chinese are passed into the mail slot of a room, and, after a while, a written answer comes out, and the Chinese reader is satisfied that the answers are intelligent. Inside the Chinese room, however is nothing but a series of filing cabinets cards on which are written Chinese characters, and a notebook or set of notebooks with a set of rules. In the room is a man who does not read Chinese. The rules tell the man when he sees a note, and the first ideogram is a (to him) meaningless squiggle of a certain shape, to go to a specific cabinet, open a certain file, go to a certain page, copy the character written there, go to another page copy that character, and so on. The rules can be as complicated as you like. The man sees the second ideogram of such-and-such a squiggle, he is to go not to file A but to file B, open folder 1, copy page 3, and so on.
We can easily imagine the opening of any such a bit of “Chinese Room” dialog. If ideogram A means “How are you?” open file 1, page 1, where is written ideogram B, which means “I am fine; how are you?” To the man in the room, the conversation is without any understanding. Ideogram A provokes reaction B. That is all the dialog means to the man. To the Chinese speaker, however, the Chinese Room seems quite polite. When you ask it “How are you?” the empty room replies “I am fine, how are you?”
Does the man walking from file to file understand Chinese, no matter how intricately the rules are that he follows? The answer is no. Do the filing cabinets understand Chinese? No. Searle argued that a computer that could pass the Turing Test was nothing more or less than a Chinese Room, something that reacted but could not act, something that looked like it understood, but did not understand.
Now, much ink has been spilled over the meaning of the Seale thought-experiment, and, in my humble opinion, all of it wasted ink. Searle (and his supporters) say that the thought experiment proves that the man in the room need not understand Chinese in order to pass the Turing Test. This means that the Turing Test does not actually test for consciousness. Turing (and his supporters) say that the room “as a whole” (whatever that means) “understands” (whatever that means) the Chinese language, and that it means nothing in particular the man himself does not understand Chinese. Does one braincell in the brain of an English speaker understands English? Both are missing an obvious point. Both are arguing about whether a letter understands what is written in the letter. Whoever filled the filing cabinets and wrote the grammar rules for the Chinese Room understands Chinese. The letter-writer understands the letter, not the piece of paper.
Turing and his meditations on whether computers would be aware if they seemed to an observer to be aware never seems to rise above this crudest imaginable materialism: they never seem to contemplate that computers have to be programmed by someone. The Chinese Room is not “polite” if rule one is to answer meaningless squiggle in file A “How are you?” with meaningless squiggle in file B “I am fine; how are you?” : The only person who is polite is the Chinaman, whoever he is, who wrote the ideogram, not meaningless to him, that he placed carefully and deliberately in file B. If the Chinaman, without any notice to John Searle (or whoever the poor boob is trapped in the Chinese Room) had written instead, “I am fine; you are a swine!” then the “Room” would be impolite.
The real question about the Chinese Room is whether or not speech that is not rote speech can be reduced to an algorithm. The real question, in other words, is whether John Searle, trapped in the Chinese Room, merely by following even absurdly complex rules of sentence construction, could coin a new term, or use an old word in a poetical way that showed insight, a new meaning not present before. Now, neologisms can indeed be coined by rote. Children make such coinages, usually in the form of cute mistakes, all the time. There is no reason the Chinese Room could not put “Ize” in file 5, and establish rule 101 “add file five to any word X” where the rules of X include those words we want to turn into verbs from nouns. “Nounize” “Vulcanize” “Paragraphize” are all coined terms that I have here and now Turingized. You might be able to guess their meaning. I have meaningized them.
Poetry is a different question. The whole point of poetic expressions is that a new aspect of meaning has been brought out of an unusual use of a word, or out of a new phrase. If it is something you can reduce to an algorithms, it is not poetry. Indeed, the thing that makes you wince when I use the term “meaningize” is the very lack of poetry in that coinage; it is a mechanical, predictable, soulless.
A reader with the tumultuous yet academic name of “Doc Rampage” writes in to ask: “I don’t understand your tone towards Searle. You agree with his argument but think he should not have made it? Why? You think it is waste of time trying to argue with materialists?
Let me answer by going to the various filing cabinets in my mind and piecing together pieces of paper according to an algorithm of rules. Hmm….
I agree with Searle as far as his argument goes, but I think having the argument at all gives undue (and misleading) credit to radical materialism. It is not that it is a waste of time to argue with materialists (it is. We should merely reprogram their brain atoms) it is that the terms of the argument grant the materialist an axiom I think it unwise to grant them—that the question of consciousness is an empirical rather than a moral question.
Searle’s position is the opposite of the Turing position: Searle’s position (if I understand it) argues that an empirical test for consciousness does not prove consciousness, because the computer or the Chinese Room can pass the empirical test for consciousness by rote without any conscious mind being present. Hence the test (Searle correctly concludes) does not actually test for the property being testing for.
Turing’s position (if I understand it) is that we know about consciousness the way we know about anything else, by empirical test. Any computer or Chinese Room that can pass the empirical test for consciousness, is “conscious” for all practical purposes as far as we are concerned.
I call both arguments misguided because there is no empirical test for consciousness.
One might as well argue about solipsism. We make a judgment call that some men are sane and other insane based on whether they are aware of the meaning of their acts, or oriented to time, place and person. The “test” in the Chinese Room of Searle only tests for whether the Chinaman who sets up the rules for the room is conscious: but we already know he is. The “test” for whether a computer can pass the Turing test is whether or not the computer programmer can cunningly enough anticipate and imitate a real-life conversation: but no one cares whether he can or not, since it has nothing to do with consciousness in a computer.
Myself, I am much more concerned with whether or not an allegedly intelligent computer can pass the McNaughton Test rather than the Turing Test. The legal standard for insanity was first established in the McNaughton case (where a paranoid man shot and killed the secretary of the British Prime Minister, believing that the Prime Minister was conspiring against him). The test is whether, “at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.”
This is a legal and moral and not an empirical test. We can call it an “empirical” test if and only if we assert (as some Philosophers do) that all knowledge is empirical—but this fails to distinguish between things that are truly empirical questions, such as the mass, length, duration, amperage, temperature, amount, or luminous intensity of a material object, and things that cannot possibly be reduced to such measurement, such as, for example, whether or not McNaughton at the time of the crime knew the nature and quality of the act, and knew it was wrong.
We know about consciousness because we are conscious. We know other people are conscious because only a sociopath treats other people like objects, like robots, like manikins: it is a conclusion of moral reasoning, not of empirical reasoning.
The reason why we are not all solipsists is not because there is or could be convincing empirical evidence that other souls are conscious. There can be no such empirical evidence, because “consciousness” is not something that can be reduced to or described in units of mass, length, duration, amperage, temperature, amount, or luminous intensity. The reason we are not all solipsists is that a self-consistent solipsist is a sociopath, a creature that treats other people like moving manikins, not as people. It is morally wrong to be a sociopath, ergo it is impractical and unjust to be a solipsist. Does this mean we, as philosophers, should be convinced solipsism is wrong? Not at all. We may entertain the notion of solipsism in the abstract, just as long as we do not allow that notion to influence our actions, lest we end as bloodthirsty, misanthropic, dangerous, empty-souled as Marxists, with eyes as dead and inhuman as theirs.
Hence, Searle is right but is off the point. The Chinese Room can seem to speak Chinese even when the Chinaman who set up the filing cabinets in the room is no longer present.
Turing is wrong but is off the point, way off the point. The Chinese Room “can speak Chinese” because it can fool my Chinese granny into thinking some living person is behind the mail slot in the door.
It is like listening to two philosophers debating about whether or not the book understands the words written in it, without ever once mentioning that the books are written by authors.
IMO, the whole SYSTEM of the Room would be sapient, but keep in mind that (1) the “filing cabinets” would be IMMENSE and (2) the System would thnk very, very, VERY slowly (because it would essentially be a text-and-manual-operation based Artificial Intelligence. You could tell that the Chinese Room was some such device by the fact that it would take days to answer you!
If the system as a whole is sapient, try to teach it French. And I don’t mean by adding more filing cabinets with more pieces of paper that are meaningless to the operator: I mean the way human beings learn languages, by talking and interacting with other people who speak it fluently.
The fact is, the so-called sapience of the room is merely parasitic on the actual sapience and programming skill of the person who constructed it.
By the way, there are strong grounds to believe that such a room is not possible even in theory: the open-ended nature of language makes it impossible to reduce the domain of possible conversations to a set (no matter how long) of algorithmic rules. Chomsky spent fifty years of his life (when not disgracefully attacking and undermining his own country) searching for such a set of rules, and while to the best of my knowledge he has never given up, he has explored the question sufficiently for less dogmatic minds to make a determination. From what I understand, linguists who are not disciples of Chomsky now tend to the view that language is a non-computable problem.
Thanks for pointing that out about Chomsky. He has always seemed to me to be the linguistic equivalent of Freud. I’m glad that he’s taken the time to write about his theories, because they’ve inspired some real gems. But the theories themselves are mostly nonsense.
When I first heard of the Chinese Room, I came up with this conclusion to. And I thought “What is the issue here? The solution is simple and obvious.” And so I pondered the reason for the debate for a number of years, and I tried to understand and failed. Eventually, I came to a very sudden understanding, and the entire basis of my materialist philosophy collapsed; I became completely agnostic on the subject, and many others.
Let us put aside the Chinese Room for a moment. I come Australia. We are a very dry country with an unreliable rainfall, yet we prefer to get our food locally. Drought is a significant risk. Now there’s many causes of drought, but one that was taught to me in high school, was the El Niño effect. If I recall—and I’m no climatologist, this is just from high school years ago—the atmosphere reads the ocean temperature off the coast of South America. If it’s warmer than normal, it outputs floods in South America and droughts in Australia. If it’s cooler than normal, it does the opposite.
Actually it’s a lot more complex than that. I’m simplifying it. There’s far more detail, and there’s something of a dialogue with the ocean. The different temperature this year can have effects next year too, much like a conversation today can make me angry tomorrow.
Now, I’m certain that I’m conscious and sapient and intelligent and self-aware and capable of subjective experience and all of these other things. You will have to take my word for it, but I don’t know how else it can be.
What’s the difference between me and the atmosphere? Why should we classify “the system of the Chinese Room” alongside me, and not the atmosphere? Why can you murder me, or psychologically scar me for life, but you can’t do these to the atmosphere? Be careful not to be too specific to the atmosphere in your answer, because there’s a million other complex systems I could just have easily used in my example.
Those who wish to ascribe sapience to the system of the room need to answer these questions. So far, the most satisfactory answer I’ve come up with, is that I can be intelligent but the atmosphere isn’t because there is something special about human intelligence that cannot be described by neuroscience and is not subject to it.
Would you agree with my contention that the question is a moral quandary and not an empirical question? Beating a dog so it won’t wet the carpet is an act with a moral implication (you could, for example, be cruel rather than admonishing in the beating), whereas reprogramming a sprinkler system so it won’t wet the carpet has no moral implications (you cannot be cruel to a sprinkler system no matter how hard you try).
I am unable to get around the idea that the “test” for a Chinese Room to find out if it is self-aware is to ask it, “Are you self-aware?” and if it decides to answer truthfully, it is self-aware, and if it decides to lie and deceive you, it is still self aware, but it is a bad and untrustworthy Chinese Room. You then have to get to know the Chinese Room well enough to know whether it is trustworthy: if it gets shifty or evasive when you ask it hard questions, that could be a sign that it is lying. Pay particular attention to how it treats other people, whether it lies or keeps its word, or leave a pound note sitting in its mail slot when it thinks no one is looking, to see whether it volunteers to return the money, or keeps it to spend at the pub.
If (on the other hand) a letter comes through the mail slot of the Chinese Room that looks like an answer, but is actually merely meaningless marks on the page unintentionally forming what look like characters in a written language you read, is is, of course, not an “answer” at all, except in the loose sense of the word. Then it does not matter what the marks look like, because the Chinese Room is not “answering” you any more than a clock is “telling” you the time. The clockmaker is the one who arranges the numbers on the dial, and he is the one to whom those numbers have meaning, not the clock.
I hope the stark absurdity of “getting to know the Chinese Room” so that you can assess its personality characteristics, assessing how evasive its answers are, shows the problem with the whole thought experiment.
I’m getting some Word Press error. I hope this doesn’t result in double posts.
The question is not empirical, and that’s the point. There is nothing absurd about it. The point of the Chinese Room is to show the problems with materialism. If you look at it in isolation, sure, it looks absurd. Sure, it apparently permits a materialist interpretation as Jordan and me-of-years-past give it. The Chinese Room needs to be considered as a part of philosophy of mind, with access to all of its ideas. If you do so honestly, I think you will recognise that materialism is not a simple or logical or even reasonable philosophy. You (i.e. “one”, not “John C. Wright”) may still be a materialist at the end, but only because of an assumption somewhere else in your reasoning. (Unless you permit some assumptions in your reasoning, you end up like me: incapable of action. Assumptions are necessary, but that doesn’t mean the ones you’ve made are necessarily right or wrong.)
Be aware that your “personality” analysis is an attempt at an empirical answer to the Chinese Room problem. It is therefore completely and entirely wrong; the Chinese Room is not an empirical question. In any case, there’s no reason to suppose that a non-human lying will behave even remotely similarly to a human lying. Also, having generally told the truth I could now lie and say “I am not a conscious/self-aware being”. Your rejection of that would be based on ideas other than my behavior (because I have done nothing but accurately describe my reasoning and opinions) and my answer (because I said that I’m not self aware, but you’ll assume that I am.)
The Chinese Room does lead us to a moral quandry, particularly if we do not abandon materialism at this point. We know that it is possible that an act might be immoral even though we cannot measure its pain or harm. Catholics believe a woman who takes a contraceptive pill which makes her womb hostile to a freshly fertilised egg has commit murder, but physically all that has happened is a few cells have ceased to develop and begin to break down like the skin cells I discard so often. There is no physical evidence for the wrong, but that does not mean it is wrong. Importantly, this means your assumption that reprogramming a sprinkler system is morally neutral, is insufficiently well grounded. You need some reason to discard materialism before you can do that.
“I’m getting some Word Press error. I hope this doesn’t result in double posts.”
Comments are held for moderation, so won’t show up immediately.
“Be aware that your “personality” analysis is an attempt at an empirical answer to the Chinese Room problem. It is therefore completely and entirely wrong; the Chinese Room is not an empirical question.”
Exactly my point. Hence my emphasis on the McNaughton Test rather than the Turing Test. The question of whether or not a person is a “person” or not is a legal question, not a empirical one. Jurors do not perform the laboratory tests of a police scientists when making this determination: what is called “illative” rather than deductive or inductive reasoning is involved. Illative reasoning is when you look at a problem in context and see whether it fit or does not fit the expected pattern or model.
“Now, I’m certain that I’m conscious and sapient and intelligent and self-aware and capable of subjective experience and all of these other things. You will have to take my word for it, but I don’t know how else it can be.”
Well, I can compare your writing to that of, let us say, James Joyce’s ULYSSES, and this leads me to conclude, based on my past experience and the synthesis of many chains of reasoning, that your words are written by a real person, and his was written by a thousand monkeys typing at random. This gives me independent evidence of your consciousness, since words do not arise without a cause, and no cause can make words meaningful aside from consciousness: and this, honestly, is no greater a leap of faith than an man from before 1959 assuming the far side of the moon was a hemisphere.
No-one can make words meaningful aside from consciousness. Well, this is true, but it is also irrelevant. The fact that I can read words and interpret meaning into them doesn’t mean that the words were meaningful in the first place when they were produced. A computational linguist working with an artificial intelligence expert might be able to produce a system that is apparently conscious. But is it? And you can’t transfer the meaning back to person who programmed the system, because it might be describing something the programmer new nothing about, using words learnt “in passing” thanks to advanced learning algorithms.
And what have words to do with morality anyway? It was a crime to kill me before I could speak. Damage Wernicke’s area in my brain and I will speak only gibberish—your average directory assistance bot will be a better conversational partner—but I will still be intelligent and creative and fully conscious. You can damage any number of parts of my brain, and it can have all sorts of effects on my cognitive capacities from planning to personality to language and even to perception. You can find a swampan or build an android that will behave in every way the same as me, but none of this provides any evidence for meaning or consciousness, which I fundamentally know I have.
From what you have said on other occasions, I would’ve assumed on this subject we would be in agreement on this subject. Yet we seem to be disagreeing! What do I misunderstand of your opinion?
(Plus, I actually received a full on WP error. I didn’t save it, but it referred to php files and everything. Eventually I submitted it and it informed me it had been held for moderation.)
I am not sure where we disagree, because I don’t grasp what your particular question is. Please feel free to ask, and I will do my best to answer.
The following are useful
John R. Searle: Is the Brain a Digital Computer?
(His answer: No, the brain cannot be a computer. His Chinese Room demonstrates this.)
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/searle.comp.html
J.R. Lucas: Minds, Machines and Gödel
(A mathematical/logical proof that the mind cannot be a calculating machine)
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/mmg.html
Thomas Nagel: What is it like to be a bat?
(The absurdity of reductionism in the context of mind.)
http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf
James Ross: Immaterial Aspects of Thought
(“The difficulty is that, in principle, such truth-carrying thoughts cannot be wholly physical (though they might have a physical medium), because they have features that no physical thing or process can have at all.”)
http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/ross-immateriality.pdf
Edward Feser: Why Searle Is a Property Dualist
(“John Searle has tried to stake out a middle position between materialism and property dualism, which he calls ‘biological naturalism.’ To many of his critics (e.g. Nagel 1995…), biological naturalism has seemed little more than property dualism in disguise.”)
http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/searle.html
“The reason why we are not all solipsists is not because there is or could be convincing empirical evidence that other souls are conscious.”
My philosophical training not being what it should be, this observation made me realize that I don’t know if the way we usually conclude other beings are conscious is actually empirical or not; i.e., being conscious ourselves, we observe beings very like us in appearance and very like us in behavioural patterns and experience, and infer that they possess the same quality we do.
Is it “empirical” to conclude that in the absence of contrary evidence, entities like the observer in every testable respect can be validly presumed to be like the observer in untestable respects — in other words, to bet that what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck is likelier to be a duck than anything else? Which is more empirical — to conclude that other people are people like me, or to conclude that everyone except me is a philosophical zombie, given no ability to test for the definitional differential quality between the hypotheses?
It’s interesting that you bring up solipsism as sociopathy, in that this always struck me as one of the thought-experiment goals of BLINDSIGHT, as a story: Siri Keeton seemed like Watts’ attempt to write a sociopath character who could transcend his sociopathy purely through training, engineering and programming. It is ridiculous to treat Chinese Rooms as people; Keeton, as a character, interacts with others mostly via the reverse tactic, treating people as Chinese Rooms — logic systems that must be correctly navigated rather than fellow beings who must be intuitively, experientially understood.
On the Chinese Room, it seems to me that some commenters are conflating intelligence with consciousness, subjective experience, or sapience. Although we very rarely come across them separately, they can nonetheless be separated. Consider the Chinese Room, or better still consider Deep Blue, the chess machine. Nobody claims that Deep Blue has consciousness, but it has intelligence in the very narrow sense of playing excellent chess. And this intelligence cannot be traced to its creators, for they don’t know how to play such good chess; no human does. Thus they have created an intelligence greater than their own. (As far as chess goes, that is.)
Now chess is relatively easy to formalise – relatively! It only took thirty or so years to produce the combination of software and hardware that can beat any human. However, it seems to me that anything a human does could in principle be formalised by the following procedure: Create a humongous computer, and within it simulate a human brain down to the individual quarks. (Not quirks, those are emergent.) Additionally simulate some of his surroundings, and, let us say, a mail slot through which simulated pieces of paper can be put, bearing questions. Whether this simulation has consciousness or not is in dispute; I think most here would say that it does not. (Although it will certainly claim to be conscious; for so does its unsimulated predecessor in response to the input “Are you conscious?” And unless it is asserted that these words do not arise only from interactions of atoms, the simulated atoms, following the same laws, must produce the same words whether or not they are true of the simulation.) But whatever is the case for consciousness, the simulation must certainly have intelligence, in the same sense that Deep Blue does; if the copied human is a good chess player, the simulation will be able to play good chess; if he is a poet, the simulation can emit good poetry. Yet all this is the movement of electrons within a humongous computer.
Now, it may be that poetry (to take that example) is not formalisable by any simpler means than this ginormous simulation. This doesn’t seem likely to me, because the human brain can do many other things than poetry and therefore poetry should be producible by a simpler object; but it is certainly possible. To borrow a term from computer science, poetry may be “human-complete” – you can’t find a formalisation any faster than just copying a whole human, which rather defeats the purpose. But this would not demonstrate that poetry cannot be formalised at all; only that humans are the simplest possible formalisation.
“Consider the Chinese Room, or better still consider Deep Blue, the chess machine. Nobody claims that Deep Blue has consciousness, but it has intelligence in the very narrow sense of playing excellent chess.”
And Grandfather Clock has intelligence in the very narrow sense of being able to count the minutes and hours correctly, adding up the sums in its head, and telling me the correct time, by deciding to play the chimes hanging in his case. Oddly, Grandfather Clock always decides just exactly on the hour and half-hour to ring the correct chimes. I am astonished at how accurately Grandfather Clock’s sense of timing is, how tirelessly he attends to his task, and how he never loses count or mistakes the number of minutes in an hour. No doubt Grandfather Clock is helped in the tireless precision of his thinking process by the wheels and gears that make up his brain. Nonetheless, we all must commend Grandfather Clock for his diligence and uncomplaining attention to detail. He is as patient and devout as a Beefeater Guard who stands before Buckingham Palace, and, like them, he never stirs from the spot where he has decided to stand.
I am kidding, of course. Grandfather Clock is a machine. It does not have any intentions, diligence, ability to count, ability to add numbers up to 60, or any other mental operations of any kind. It is not even alive. It is a machine. Deep Blue is also a machine.
If you took the time to write down every possible combination of chessman positions on a fat deck of cards, and a chessmaster took the time, for each and every possible location of chessman, to write down what he thought was the best move on the back of the card, you could pretend to play a game by setting up the board, finding the card that represented an opening, making a response, and finding the card representing the new position of the chessmen, and looking on the back of that card to see what the chessmaster thought the best response would be in that situation.
However, the deck of cards would not be playing chess. The deck of cards would not have any intention, any awareness of the chessmen or any idea of the relation between the chessmen and what they symbolically represent, or what moves or victory conditions the game entailed. The deck of cards would not be aware of the game at all. Its a deck of cards.
The deck of cards cannot win by concentrating better of by thinking of an new strategy or by correctly weighing the options open to it or by correctly guessing which pieces you are willing to sacrifice. It cannot concentrate of think or weigh options or guess.
The deck of cards, in this thought experiment, were all written out beforehand by a chessmaster. The chessmaster can think, because he is a human being with a rational soul, and an ability to make up things that do not exist in real life, such as the rules to games.
If you asked Deep Blue to play Chancellor Chess, or to abide by a house rule that forbids en passant capture of pawns that moved twice on their first move, you would not get an answer, because you cannot ask Deep Blue to change the rules. Likewise you cannot ask a deck of cards to change the rules. These things do not understand what “rules” are or why we have rules in games. They do not understand what a game is, because they are not alive and do not think.
The word “intelligence” is being used here in what is actually merely a misleading metaphor. The intelligence of Deep Blue is in the programmer of Deep Blue, who was not someone unaware of the rules of chess.
It is as if we said a red and stormy sunset was an “angry” sunset and as if next, without realizing it is a metaphor, we sat and talked quite seriously about whether the Man in the Moon had offended the sunset to make him angry, or whether merely an upset stomach or colic had angered the sunset.
The error here is the informal fallacy called ambiguity: merely using a word that has two meanings as if it had one meaning. The intelligence (meaning 1) displayed by a clockwork, a deck of chessmove cards with instructions on them, or a computer program, is the intelligence (meaning 2) of the watchmaker, chassmaster or programmer.
Also, there is a formal error in logic here, called the fallacy of the undistributed middle. The syllogism “(1) Men’s thoughts can be described in terms of complex decisions or formalization (2) Computer program logic can be described in terms of complex decisions or or formalization therefore (3) Men’s thought are computer program logic.” suffers the same error as the syllogism, “(1) Englishmen are men (2) Frenchmen are men therefore (3) Englishmen are Frenchmen.”
The whole argument is based on a mildly surrealistic premise that the only thing we know about anything are its empirical properties, and that ergo any non-empirical properties causing those empirical properties must ergo be the same in every way. I call it surreal because we are dealing with a case where the chain of cause and effect is known to be different. As if someone were to argue that, because my wife loves me, my wife’s image in the looking glass must also love me, on the grounds that she has the same look and smile and expression in her eyes. However, the smile of the image in the glass is caused by photons bouncing off the wife, not by any affection or admiration or lust or devotion on the part of the looking glass. It’s glass. Not only is it not loving, it is not even alive. The smile on the real wife is caused by the wife’s soul, or the great god Cupid, or her bad judgment or however you want to say it. The glass is not even really smiling because it is an image of a smile, not a smile.
Likewise here. Clocks do not know math, and do not know the number line, and do not count numbers and match them to passing minutes and hours. Clockmakers know how to count. Clockmakers make a machine that reflects this the way a looking glass reflects an image. We only say a clock “tells” time because we, the intelligent beings, tell time using the clock as an instrument, and it is no more than a convenient shorthand of speak to attribute to the tool the mental operations we perform using the tool.
Likewise, Deep Blue does not play chess or wins games any more that he feels satisfaction over games well played or broods over mistakes he made. He is not a he. Deep Blue is an image, a complex one, but no different than a clock. We only say that Deep Blue plays chess as a convenient shorthand of speech because we, the intelligent beings that play chess, managed to write down chess moves and groups of chess moves in a hierarchy, so that we, using the machine as a tool, can look up what move might beat the move we just made. Deep Blue is not “doing” anything. The chessplayer is looking up a move in Deep Blue’s database much as if he were looking up a move written on a page in a book in a library, but he is using Deep Blue as a mechanism to look up the move.
It would be surreality more surreal if anyone were to propose the argument is made that because we cannot tell the difference, using only our eyes, between a wife that loves us and a looking glass that loves us, therefore our wives are merely looking glasses, perhaps more complicated, but otherwise nothing different from flat reflections in a surface.
Likewise here, there is more than a little surreality in the argument is that since we intelligence beings can (after much painful thought and careful work) embody a reflection of our intelligence in a clockwork, ergo all intelligence is clockwork, including our own, therefore painful thought and careful work do not actually exist.
And when you point out that clockworks do not think and are not alive, and do not have any personal selfhood and do not have any point of view or any ability to make decisions or any subjective sensation and cannot feel pain or feel desire or feel the impulse to act, the answer you get back is … well, I don’t know what answer you get back. It is kind of eerie.
We can simulate an airplane flight to Orlando in a flight simulator; but when we leave the simulator we will not be in Orlando.
“And unless it is asserted that these words do not arise only from interactions of atoms….”
We have discussed this before, and at length. I will remind you of the simple distinction involved.
Words-as-soundwaves (the material side of words) “arise” from atoms in the sense and only in the sense that the material properties of the air-compression waves are defined by and caused by the nerve-muscular motions of the throat. Soundwaves are meaningless collections of air molecules in a certain meaningless shape suffering certain meaningless motions, and they arise from a material cause of other atoms moving them.
However words-as-word (the mental or meaningful side of words) “arise” not from atoms but from meaning and intention and from whatever it is the speaker is trying to say. They arise from a final cause. Words are purposeful and are therefore caused by purposes.
The assumption that you can use meaningful words to tell me that words have only a meaningless and physical side (material cause) and no meaning (final cause) is a self-refuting assumption. Not only is it not the cause, the mere fact that you attempt to say it is not the case proves it is the case, and no further witnesses need be called. Your own statement is sufficient proof that the statement is false.
The distinction I make here is not a difficult one, but if there is something about it that is unclear, or if the words “matter” and “meaning” and “final cause” and “material cause” are ambiguous, please tell me, and I will attempt yet again to explain.
Searle was not merely discussing the Turing Test. He was discussing the entire concept of the mind as a digital computer (for those not familiar with the philosophy of mind, the “mind” is not the same thing as the “brain”. The “brain” is a physical organ. The “mind” is the seat of consciousness and its nature is a matter of debate).
I don’t think it is going to far to say that Searle has been the single most effective academic opponent of naive materialism in the last few decades. This despite the fact that Searle himself desperately wants to be a materialist, but simply finds himself too intellectually honest to accept any of the current materialist positions.
The field of artificial intelligence is a favorite battleground in the debate between materialism and mind realism because so many AI researchers assume a position called “strong AI” which posits that mental processes (not merely “brain” processes) either are or arise out of the execution of algorithms. An algorithm is just a set of operations for carrying out some function.
There are several reasons that strong AI can’t possibly be right. One reason (and to my mind, probably the weakest) is that consciousness is not defined in terms of inputs and outputs, but in terms of mental states that are not subject to empirical verification. The point of the Chinese Box was to demonstrate this. Unfortunately, the materialists did not get the point of the argument. The strong AI response is the one proposed in Blindsight –that although the man does not understand Chinese, the entire system including the box does. What is their evidence for this? That the box responds to inputs with the right outputs. In other words, they simply assume the the truth of their position. They beg the question.
The ultimate irony, of course, is that while they are engaging in the fallacy of circular reasoning, they accuse others of engaging in a fallacy for not accepting their fallacy.
This discussion leads into another direction of special interest to science fiction writers. Sci fi, particularly in films, often have computers or robots which converse with human beings. I contend that it would be impossible for a machine to produce language exactly as a human uses it. It might be 99.99% correct, but not 100%. The reason is that the human programmer cannot list all the very fine details of grammar and word usage which he knows intuitively. Indeed, I would predict that the minor errors made by a computer would assist linguists in formulating these precise rules. Also, it would not be possible to programme a computer to learn a language in the same way a human being learns a language, because we cannot know all the fine details of the system. We are not as clever as the One who programmed us. In any case, any brain constructed of wheels and gears, silicon chips, fibre optics, positrons, or whatever, in the final analysis, must act differently from one made of flesh and blood.
So remember this, sci fi writers: Robbie the Robot will never completely imitate human speech.
Also, the beefeaters guard the Tower of London, not Buckingham Palace.
“Also, the beefeaters guard the Tower of London, not Buckingham Palace.”
Arrrgh. Either I made a Yank mistake and must own up to is, or a memory gear in my thought-box slipped a cam, and my brain is merely a machine, and need never own up to anything again.
I think that there will be talking robots within twenty years whose speech is, within certain restricted conversation topics, indistinguishable from people.
Although, as you say, linguistic rules are subtle and detailed, what they are not is uniform. There are millions of different sets of linguistic rules. No two people follow exactly the same rules, even people within the same family. So there isn’t any exact set of rules that has to be encoded to get a robot to sound human, all you need to do is get the rules within a tolerable distance of some mean.
It is a serious rhetorical mistake for anti-materialists to spend a lot of time speculating that simulating speech is impossible anyway. If and when speech is simulated (and I believe it will be) then these statements will be used as “proof” that the anti-materialists were wrong, and that will be considered “proof” that the materialists are right.
Besides, the materialists get to decide what counts as speech simulation. If you ever read popular article about behaviorism you have seen arguments like this: (1) people used to say that the difference between animals and humans is that humans are tool-users and animals are not. (2) we have this amazing new discovery that chimpanzees stick grass straws into termite holes to get termites. (3) this is an example of tool-using by animals, (4) ergo, there is no difference between animals and humans. The argument is ridiculous of course, but it is still persuasive to many people and popular media doesn’t give opponents a decent chance to explain why it is ridiculous. Anti-materialists have to be on the guard against this sort of thing by not making statements that could be construed as arguments and then “refuted” by future developments.
I hate to go off topic again but would feel remiss if John didn’t get to appreciate the Art of Manliness website.
I am well aware of the Art of Manliness website, and the book of the same name is sitting on my shelf.
One day soon I shall no doubt rise from my lavender couch of soft cushions where I loll, reclining on marshmallow stuffed pillows, eating grapes with my fat muchly beringed fingers and griping prettily and pettily in soft, ironic lisps about how unfair life is, or what pastel color I should have the serving maidens paint my perfumed toes. On that day the sunlight will strike my vast globe of albino-pallid flesh for the first time, and daze my soft cowlike eyes, and I will stagger back in slippered feet, mewling. Sometime thereafter I will take up this book and read it, while sipping iced sherbet with a delicate spoon.
I am a great fan of manliness and manly things. My admiration is more theoretical than actual, in my case, since I have never once cooked on a grill or been to a ball game or repaired a car engine. Being an effete intellectual, the only manliness I can display is, of course, intellectual manliness, which means honesty in intellectual debate, and chivalry to one’s honorable opposition, and a bitter hatred of unfair tactics, such as ad hominem.
And sometimes I have to show Christian manliness (which Christian women seem to be able to do better than men) and forgive and ask forgiveness. That is as much fun as a visit to the shortsighted and epileptic dentist.
Then I must shame you for not putting up a link somewhere such that your fans (both of us) might have enjoyed as much sooner.
Of course, do not disparage your lack of manliness, I dare say that masculinity in debate is frequently even more challenging than dismantling a transmission.
If, however, you feel that deprived, my father always has need of work done on the family farm (and I am but the only son – indeed the only child to aid him). He might be willing to tutor you in some basic logging if you feel the urge (though I get the feeling he only tutored me because he had no choice
).
I don’t see that anyone else has noted this, but the philosopher who is associated with the Chinese Room is John Rogers Searle; Robert Searle was a famous pirate.
Of course, I have no definitive proof that the pirate Robert Searle was not interested in the question of artificial intelligence.