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You're just a Functionalist, exactly the sort of people the argument is supposed to criticize. Or you're missing the point.
Searles is a Biological Realist, which is to say that he believes that processes of mind are real things that emerge from the biochemical processes of human beings and that language (and symbol manipulation in general) is a reflection of those processes, not the process in itself. He thinks thoughts are real things that exist outside of language.
To wit, he argues that what the room is missing is "intentionality". It does not have the ability do to anything but react to input in ways that are predetermined by the design of the chinese manual, and insofar as any of its components are concerned (or the totality thereof) they are incapable of reflecting upon the ideas being manipulated.
Your brain does "speak chinese" properly speaking because it is able to communicate intentional thoughts using that medium. The mere ability to hold conversation does not qualify to what Searles is trying to delineate.
Not too familiar with Searle's argument, but isn't this just saying that the lack of ability to generalize out of distribution is the issue? But I don't get how being able to react to novel inputs (in a useful way) would even help things much. Suppose one did come up with a finite set of rules that allowed one to output Chinese to arbitrary inputs in highly intelligent, coherent ways. It's still, AFAICT, still just a room with a guy inside to Searle.
Perhaps it's the ability to learn. But even then, you could have the guy follow some RL algorithm to update the symbols in the translation lookup algorithm book, and it's still just a guy in the room (to Searle).
It's not even clear to me how one could resolve this: at some point, a guy in the room could be manipulating symbols in a way that mirrors Xi Jinpeng's neural activations arbitrarily closely (with a big enough room and a long enough time), and Searle and I would immediately come to completely confident and opposite conclusions about the nature of the room. It just seems flatly ridiculous to me that the presence of dopamine and glutamate impart consciousness to a system, but I don't get how to argue against that (or even get how Searle would say that's different from his actual argument).
Insofar as this is possible, (I believe Searle disagrees that it is), then the room does speak Chinese because it's just a brain.
But as I explain in the other thread, this means assuming computationalism is true, which renders the whole though experiment moot since it's supposed to be a criticism of computationalism.
I'm not sure how one would argue that it's not possible. Is the contention that there's something ineffable happening in neurons that fundamentally can't be copied via a larger model? That seems isomorphic to a "god of the gaps" argument to me.
"God of the gaps" cuts both ways. The cached Materialist narrative has some very large holes in it that are bridged through unexamined axioms and predictions that never update when falsified.
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It's quite simple in a world where the experience of consciousness is unexplained and machines don't offer the same sort of spontaneous behavior as humans, actually.
It's not compatible with strict materialism, but then again most people don't believe in strict materialism.
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My response is that there isn't a point to miss.
That strikes me as the genuine opposite of what someone with a realistic understanding of biology would believe, but I guess people can call themselves whatever they like. It strikes me as unfalsifiable Cartesian Dualism or a close relative, and worth spending no more time rebutting with evidence than it was forwarded without evidence.
What is so mysterious about this "intentionality"? Give the Room a prompt that requires it to reason about being a Chinese Room. Problem solved.
What is the mechanism by which a thought is imbued with "intentionality"? Where, from a single neuron, to a brain lobe, to the whole human, does it arise?
Realism is a term of art in metaphysics in particular and philosophy in general. It is the view that reality exists outside of the processes of the mind, the opposite of anti-realism (solipsism, skepticism, etc).
For what it's worth, Skepticism, which I take to be your view if you're making this objection, is also unfalsifiable. As are all statements in metaphysics.
I happen to be a metaphysical skeptic myself, but this isn't an argument. We're talking about something more fundamental than notions of falsifiablity or correspondence. You can't use logic even.
What isn't? Consciousness is the most mysterious phenomenon I have ever experienced. It is so mysterious in fact as to be a centerpiece of many religious traditions.
Why do humans go about doing things on their own instead of merely reacting to their environment? Is it just a more complex form of the instinctive behavior we see in other animals or something entirely different? And why do I have qualia? These are mysteries.
Unless the writer of the manual understands reasoning to a sufficient degree as to provide exhaustive answer to all possible questions of the mind, this isn't possible. And certainly isn't within the purview of the thought experiment as originally devised.
We don't know yet. We may possibly never know. But we can observe the phenomenon all the same.
If we really want to get into this, then proving (and disproving) anything is mathematically impossible..
This makes axioms necessary to be a functional sapient entity. Yet axioms are thus incredibly precious, and not to be squandered or proliferated lightly.
To hold as axiomatic that there exists some elan vital of "intent" that the room lacks, but a clearly analogous system in the human brain itself possesses, strains credulity to say the least. If two models of the world have the same explanatory power, and do not produce measurable differences in expectation, the sensible thing to do is adopt the one that is more parsimonious.
(It would help if more philosophers had even a passing understanding of Algorithmic Information Theory)
Why not? What exactly breaks if we ask that the creator of the Room makes it so?
It is already a very unwieldy object, a pure look-up-table that could converse in Chinese is an enormous thing. Or is it such an onerous ask that we go beyond "Hello, where is the library?" in Chinese? You've already shot for the moon, what burden the stars?
If the Room can equipped to productively answer questions that require knowledge of the inner mechanisms of the Room, then the problem is solved.
For consciousness? Maybe. I'd be surprised if we never got an answer to it, and a mechanistic one to boot. Plenty of mysterious and seemingly ontologically basic phenomenon have crumbled under empirical scrutiny.
Non functionalists disagree that it is analogous. So you need to actually make that argument beyond "it is obviously so because it is so from the functionalist standpoint".
Moreover, you're defending two contradictory positions here.
On the one hand, you seem ready to concede to metaphysical skepticism and the idea that knowledge is impossible. On the other hand, you're using the Naive Empiricist idea that systems can only be considered to exist if they have measurable outcomes. These are not compatible.
If what you're doing is simply instrumentally using empiricism because it works, you must be ready to admit that there are truths that are possibly outside of its reach, including the inner workings of systems that contain hidden variables. Otherwise you are not a skeptic.
It requires the assumption that cognition is reducible to computation, which makes the entire experiment useless as a prop to discuss whether that view is or isn't satisfactory. It turns it into a tautology.
If computationalism is true, computationalism is true.
You should be careful with that line of thinking.
Surely you must be familiar with the story of Lord Kelvin's speech to the Royal Society inwhich he stipulated that Physics was now almost totally complete save for two small clouds.
Explaining those "small" issues would of course end up requiring the creation of special relativity and quantum mechanics, which were neither small tasks, nor ultimately complete to this day and unearthed a lot more problems along the way.
Whatever one thinks of our epistemic position, I always recommend humility.
On the flip side... how is the thought experiment helping illustrate anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with Searle's take? It's as if he's saying "...and obviously the room doesn't know anything so functionalism is wrong."
One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. 🤷
I believe the original intent was indeed that the concept of the room being intelligent should be absurd enough as to discredit the idea of functionalism. As in specifically designing something that is, ostensibly, fake would still pass the bar for what people would consider artificially intelligent.
The popularity of the thought experiment is, I think, a good example of a scissor statement where depending on your metaphysical outlook you will be puzzled that anybody could ever think the room is or isn't speaking Chinese.
Hence to disregard the experiment as fruitless is a mistake in my view, it's interesting precisely because it generates wildly different certainties.
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I am large, I contain multitudes. As far as I'm concerned, there is no inherent contradiction behind my stance.
Knowledge without axiomatic underpinning is fundamentally impossible, due to infinite regress. Fortunately, I do have axioms and presumably some of them overlap with yours, or else we wouldn't have common grounds for useful conversation.
I never claimed being a "skeptic" as a label, that's your doing, so I can only apologize if it doesn't fit me. If there are truths beyond materialist understanding, regretfully we have no other way of establishing them. What mechanism ennobles non-materialists, letting them pick out Truth safe from materialism from the ether of all possible concepts? And how does it beat a random number generator that returns TRUE or FALSE for any conjecture under the sun?
I must then ask them to please demonstrate where a Chinese Room, presumably made of atoms, differs from human neurons, also made of atoms.
I reject your claim this is a tautology. A Chinese Room that speaks Chinese is a look-up table. A Chinese Room that speaks Chinese while talking about being a Chinese Room is a larger LUT. Pray tell what makes the former valid, and the latter invalid. Is self-referentiality verboten? Can ChatGPT not talk about matrix multiplication?
I'm all for epistemic humility, but I fail to see the relevance here. It's insufficient grounds for adding more ontologically indivisible concepts to the table than are strictly necessary, and Searle's worldview doesn't even meet necessity, let alone strictness.
There's epistemic humility, and there's performative humility, a hemming and hawing and wringing of hands that we just can't know that things are the way they seem, there must be more, and somehow this validates my worldview despite it having zero extra explanatory power.
Please understand that words refer to concepts, in this case the specific metaphysical position that you claim to adhere to, which is incompatible with materialism.
Now, since you seem to claim to be an instrumental materialist only, which I provided for in my statement, you can't, in good faith, refute anti-materialism from a materialist standpoint. Since you have renounced your claim to the truth and no set of axiom is privileged.
You can do it from within its own framework, or you can simply conjecture. But that doesn't seem to be what you're doing here.
The same as materialists. Philosophy.
We have established that disagreeing with someone's axioms doesn't entitle you to any sort of metaphysical high ground, have we not?
You can't assume that cognition can be reduced to computation, this has to be argued. I mean you can assume it if you want, but then it is a tautology.
The fact that Searles did not make this assumption as part of his statement of the thought experiment. If by validity you mean relevance. I don't see the point in discussing the tautological version of the thought experiment. And neither do you since the initial impulse of this conversation is that it would be obviously useless.
Given I've not actually provided my view on this topic here, I don't see how I could be engaging in this, if that's what you're trying to imply.
There can be more, and you're acting with a certainty that does not recognize this, which I find unbecoming.
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