That’s really a flawed analogy, though. In this analogy, the man isn’t passing the Chinese Turing Test – the program is passing the Turing Test. The man is just the hardware that the program is running on.
It’s not a question of whether the man (the hardware) has any understanding. What you want to know is if the program has any understanding. Honestly, it seems like deliberately muddying the issue by proposing this hypothetical ‘intelligent hardware’ and using it to distract from the actual question about the software’s intelligence.
If I’m running a supposedly ‘intelligent’ AI on my 3090, you can’t refute that by pointing out that the 3090 is not intelligent on its own, without software.
In this situation, neither the hardware (man) nor software (program / instructions) has any understanding. The man is blindly following instructions, while the program is simply… instructions. Searle was trying to highlight that neither understanding nor consciousness arises automatically just by having a fancy and convincing output generator.
Another nice, more recent quote:
I demonstrated years ago with the so-called Chinese Room Argument that the implementation of the computer program is not by itself sufficient for consciousness or intentionality. Computation is defined purely formally or syntactically, whereas minds have actual mental or semantic contents, and we cannot get from syntactical to the semantic just by having the syntactical operations and nothing else. To put this point slightly more technically, the notion “same implemented program” defines an equivalence class that is specified independently of any specific physical realization. But such a specification necessarily leaves out the biologically specific powers of the brain to cause cognitive processes. A system, me, for example, would not acquire an understanding of Chinese just by going through the steps of a computer program that simulated the behavior of a Chinese speaker.
It’s not my analogy, I take no credit for it. If you follow the link to Stanford Philosophy, there’s plenty of discourse; including pretty much every counterargument possible. It’s an interesting read.
![I mean ... what are we doing here? [instachaaz]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9c19bb81-be5a-4782-89da-82b4737b9147.jpeg){kind=link}
That’s really a flawed analogy, though. In this analogy, the man isn’t passing the Chinese Turing Test – the program is passing the Turing Test. The man is just the hardware that the program is running on.
It’s not a question of whether the man (the hardware) has any understanding. What you want to know is if the program has any understanding. Honestly, it seems like deliberately muddying the issue by proposing this hypothetical ‘intelligent hardware’ and using it to distract from the actual question about the software’s intelligence.
If I’m running a supposedly ‘intelligent’ AI on my 3090, you can’t refute that by pointing out that the 3090 is not intelligent on its own, without software.
In this situation, neither the hardware (man) nor software (program / instructions) has any understanding. The man is blindly following instructions, while the program is simply… instructions. Searle was trying to highlight that neither understanding nor consciousness arises automatically just by having a fancy and convincing output generator.
Another nice, more recent quote:
It’s not my analogy, I take no credit for it. If you follow the link to Stanford Philosophy, there’s plenty of discourse; including pretty much every counterargument possible. It’s an interesting read.