Minds, Brains, and Programs
by John Searle
Department of Philosophy
University of California
Summary
John Searle hypothesized an experiment he called "The Chinese Room." It follows as thus, if a programmer created an AI that was so advanced, it could pass the Turing test. Also, what if this program were given the task to receive input in the form of Chinese words and then give logical output also in Chinese, does this AI "understand" Chinese? He comes to his conclusion that it does not "understand" Chinese via another proposed situation. If he went put into a locked room with a Chinese dictionary and a native Chinese speaker was slipping a piece of paper with Chinese on it under the door, and he looked it up and responded, would you conclude he speaks Chinese? He says no, and therefore, the computer does not "understand" Chinese because it is doing the same thing as he is, just faster.
Discussion
I would conclude that Searle's conclusions are false. I would use the same reasoning he did to show that yes, this computer does in fact "understand" Chinese (maybe not very well, but at least to some degree). He says that since he is having to look up the words to be able to communicate he doesn't speak Chinese and since the computer is doing just that, but at a faster rate, it too doesn't "understand" Chinese, but is this not how a human brain works? For the native speaker, he hears the word, then his brain "looks up" what it means and various pieces of information about the word so he can understand its meaning. If a computer could do this at the same speed then what is the difference between a computer doing it or the human brain doing it?
No comments:
Post a Comment