Bibliography:
John R. Searle. John R. Searle's Chinese Room: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/cache/searle.html
Summary:
The article talks about John Searle's chinese room argument. The argument tries to show that the 'strong artificial intelligence' position of the Materialism doctrine is false. The idea behind strong artificial intelligence is that any machine with the right program would be 'mental'. The idea behind Searle's argument is to construct a machine that would be a zombie (not mental) with any program. If this machine exists, then the existance of strong AI is false.
The thought experiment in the chinese room arguement, is that a human behaves as a machine, that implements a program (the rulebook) that has rules for constructing chinese characters from given chinese characters. Though, this human can repond to chinese, he does not understand it. Thus, there exists a machine (the human) which, given any program, does not understand chinese, and hence is not mental. This means that the strong AI argument is false.
Some cognitive scientists criticize this argument and support strong AI. The most convincing counter argument against the chinese room comes from differentiating the person from his brain. Though the person does not understand chinese, he cannot say for sure if his brain understands it. The person is an unreliable source of information about the understanding of his brain. Furthermore, the chinese room is setup such that it is limited to be able to understand chinese, like the way other humans do. If the person in the chinese room is freed, he can go and learn chinese by talking to other people, just like any other human would. Thus, just by changing the cause relations between the man and his environment.
Discussion:
The chinese room argument aims at disproving strong artificial intelligence. I like the argument from CS which calls this an 'intuition pump'. The reason I think so is that, our understanding of what understanding is, is very intuitive. The chinese room argument makes sense in some ways because, we as humans think we know what it means to understand something. This is where the other minds argument also makes sense.
I agree with the counter argument made by the CS, as we still don't know what understanding means from our brains perspective. But, in reality if strong ai is true, than I think technological singularity is not far away :).
John R. Searle. John R. Searle's Chinese Room: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/cache/searle.html
Summary:
The article talks about John Searle's chinese room argument. The argument tries to show that the 'strong artificial intelligence' position of the Materialism doctrine is false. The idea behind strong artificial intelligence is that any machine with the right program would be 'mental'. The idea behind Searle's argument is to construct a machine that would be a zombie (not mental) with any program. If this machine exists, then the existance of strong AI is false.
The thought experiment in the chinese room arguement, is that a human behaves as a machine, that implements a program (the rulebook) that has rules for constructing chinese characters from given chinese characters. Though, this human can repond to chinese, he does not understand it. Thus, there exists a machine (the human) which, given any program, does not understand chinese, and hence is not mental. This means that the strong AI argument is false.
Some cognitive scientists criticize this argument and support strong AI. The most convincing counter argument against the chinese room comes from differentiating the person from his brain. Though the person does not understand chinese, he cannot say for sure if his brain understands it. The person is an unreliable source of information about the understanding of his brain. Furthermore, the chinese room is setup such that it is limited to be able to understand chinese, like the way other humans do. If the person in the chinese room is freed, he can go and learn chinese by talking to other people, just like any other human would. Thus, just by changing the cause relations between the man and his environment.
Discussion:
The chinese room argument aims at disproving strong artificial intelligence. I like the argument from CS which calls this an 'intuition pump'. The reason I think so is that, our understanding of what understanding is, is very intuitive. The chinese room argument makes sense in some ways because, we as humans think we know what it means to understand something. This is where the other minds argument also makes sense.
I agree with the counter argument made by the CS, as we still don't know what understanding means from our brains perspective. But, in reality if strong ai is true, than I think technological singularity is not far away :).
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