Chinese room
From RationalWiki
The Chinese room is a thought experiment designed by John Searle in his 1980 article "Minds, Brains, and Programs." It was largely a response to Alan Turing's "Turing Test": if a computer's responses can pass for a human's, it must have some degree of intelligence. The experiment is designed to prove that computer programs will never be able to create minds because they have syntax but no semantics. The experiment has become extremely well-known and influential in various scientific fields, especially cognitive science.[1]
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[edit] The experiment
Searle describes the thought-experiment as follows:
"Suppose that I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing...[but] to me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles. Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am given a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules for correlating the second batch with the first batch. The rules are in English, and I understand these rules as well as any other native speaker of English. They enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols, and all that 'formal' means here is that I can identify the symbols entirely by their shapes. Now suppose also that I am given a third batch of Chinese symbols together with some instructions, again in English, that enable me to correlate elements of this third batch with the first two batches, and these rules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols...from the point of view of somebody outside the room in which I am locked -- my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. Nobody just looking at my answers can tell that I don't speak a word of Chinese.'"
This could be considered to be turning the Turing Test on its head - could a human, equipped with the time and the algorithms responsible, successfully imitate a computer that has imitated a human being?
[edit] Problems
The aim of the thought experiment is to say that machines will never truly comprehend what they are saying even if they do pass the Turing Test. The point of the Turing Test being used to determine if a machine is "conscious" is that if you were to ask a machine that passed "are you conscious?" they'd reply "yes", which is pretty much the only evidence we can from other humans ("Hey, you can totally trust that I'm not a figment of your imagination or a computer program!"). Just as the man in the thought experiment fails to comprehend Chinese but still produces coherent answers, a machine can't possibly become "conscious" and that comforting thought that life is somehow special is fully preserved. There are numerous problems with this interpretation of the result, however, as well as the form of the thought-experiment.
First, the thought-experiment ignores the emergent nature of consciousness, which is the most widely accepted idea about what the phenomenon is. A computer that passes the Turing Test is no more alive when it is switched off than the code is alive when it's printed onto paper and left stored in a room. When the computer is switched on and the program is executed, however, it produces a result indistinguishable from human consciousness. Therefore, in the isolated room, it's not the man that needs to be comprehending or understanding Chinese, but the algorithm itself when combined with the operations of the man. The man no more needs to understand Chinese than the carbon atoms in his shoulder need to understand English for when he describes the odd day he's just had, pushing Chinese symbols around, to his wife.
Indeed, the experiment proves little. The man is going through the same algorithms executed by a computer, he may be doing them "manually" but he is still performing them in the same manner. It can be conceived that the pens, paper and filing cabinets needed to do this are a form of "help". We can give him more help with a calculator, then finally a robot assistant to go through the filing cabinets. We can then consider adding more "help" and automation to the process gradually until the man is essentially typing into a computer to get the result and at no point will we cross a line where it suddenly becomes the computer doing the work. The man is reduced to inputting the data into the computer and the algorithm executes in the exact same manner as it would if he did it "manually". The man has no need to understand the Chinese just as much as the fingertips that press keys or the keyboard itself has to understand the Chinese.
Finally, the entire concept begs the question that human consciousness is special and different. In order to accept the conclusion that a machine cannot comprehend the same way as humans do, you have to assume that human thinking is different to start with, otherwise the experiment fails immediately - you must assume that there is something different about the man and that he must somehow understand Chinese throughout the process.
