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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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It's a really short paper, you could just read it -- the thrust of it is that while the room might speak Chinese, this is not evidence that there's any understanding going on. Which certainly seems to be the case for the latest LLMs -- they are almost a literal implementation of the Chinese Room.

I have read it (here). @self_made_human seems to be correct. I think Searle's theory of epistemology has been proven wrong. «Speak Chinese» (for real, responding meaningfully to a human-scale distribution of Chinese-language stimuli) and «understand Chinese» are either the same thing or we have no principled way of distinguishing them.

As regards the first claim, it seems to me quite obvious in the example that I do not understand a word of the Chinese stories. I have inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker, and I can have any formal program you like, but I still understand nothing.

As regards the second claim, that the program explains human understanding, we can see that the computer and its program do not provide sufficient conditions of understanding since the computer and the program are functioning, and there is no understanding. But does it even provide a necessary condition or a significant contribution to understanding? One of the claims made by the supporters of strong AI is that when I understand a story in English, what I am doing is exactly the same—or perhaps more of the same—as what I was doing in manipulating the Chinese symbols. It is simply more formal symbol manipulation that distinguishes the case in English, where I do understand, from the case in Chinese, where I don't. I have not demonstrated that this claim is false, but it would certainly appear an incredible claim in the example.

This is just confused reasoning. I don't care what Searle finds obvious or incredible. The interesting question is whether a conversation with the Chinese room is possible for an inquisitive Chinese observer, or will the illusion of reasoning unravel. If it unravels trivially, this is just a parlor trick and irrelevant to our questions regarding clearly eloquent AI. Inasmuch as it is possible – by construction of the thought experiment – for the room to keep up appearance that's indistinguishable for a human, it just means that the sytem of programming + intelligent interpreter amount to the understanding of Chinese.

Of course this has all been debated to death.

The point of it is that you could make a machine that responds to Chinese conversation, strictly staffed by someone who doesn't understand Chinese at all -- that's it.

Maybe where people go astray is that the "program" is left as an exercise for the reader, which is sort of a sticky point.

Imagine instead of a program there are a bunch of Chinese people feeding Searle the results of individual queries, broken up into pretty small chunks per person let's say. The machine as a whole does speak Chinese, clearly -- but Searle does not. And nobody is particularly in charge of "understanding" anything -- it's really pretty similar to current GPT incarnations.

All it's saying is that just because a machine can respond to your queries coherently, it doesn't mean it's intelligent. An argument against the usefulness of the Turing test mostly, as others have said.

The point of it is that you could make a machine that responds to Chinese conversation, strictly staffed by someone who doesn't understand Chinese at all

I'm not sure you could, eg there are many conversation prompts you need situational awareness for. If the machine can account for that, it's actually a lot more active than implied, and does nontrivial information processing that goes beyond calculations over static rules. Even if we stipulate a Turing Test where the Room contains either such a machine or a perfectly boxed human behind a terminal, I am sure there are questions a non-intelligent machine of any feasible complexity will fail at.

And nobody is particularly in charge of "understanding" anything -- it's really pretty similar to current GPT incarnations.

I think it's similar to the brain: no isolated small part of it «understands» the world. If you find a part that outputs behaviors similar to products of understanding – dice it up to smaller pieces until you lose it. Irreducible complexity is a pretty obvious idea.

Most philosophers, like poets, are scientists who have failed at imagination.

All it's saying is that just because a machine can respond to your queries coherently, it doesn't mean it's intelligent.

One person's modus ponens.

Are you a stochastic parrot? Because I'm not; I don't think you really think you are either.

Like many of the doomer arguments, this one is far too silly.

It's not a doomer argument, it's just a snarky response to an obvious bullshit idea. Bender&Gebru's paper that introduced the concept is very bad and unduly dismissive of AI (and of entire fields in philology, linguistics, semiotics and computer science); this becomes clearer with every new result. Like, generalization of instruction-following between different languages – we can explain that for humans, using notions like semantic roles. Do you feel like that's possible to operate on, for a Chinese Room style arrangement that thoughtlessly goes through rules? If it is, then it's using abstractions in a very humanlike way; so how can such a Chinese Room indicate absence of understanding? If it isn't, then what do we call it – a metalinguistic parrot, or a true intelligence? What is thought, really, if not that cognition which transcends language?

For me this shit is actually hard and non-obvious; I take these ideas seriously enough to doubt gut feelings. I do not know if I am a stochastic parrot or what it even means to be one. I am not sure stochastic parrots, as understood by Gebru and endowed with general language ability, exist at all; or if they do, whether non-parrots may exist, at least among humans; like sama hints at here. Hlynka dunks on me and @2rafa for entertaining the possibility that human thought is largely analogous to LLM's parroting, but it's hard to feel insulted by that. I pride myself on possessing refined enough self-awareness to notice mechanical aspects to my own mind, though it's presumably a far cry from enlightenment. I sometimes identify people as NPCs because of noticing signs of a kindred spirit in their revealed thought.

Me having an internal psychological state that, at least, feels much more complex and alive (and what dreams I have! Human media would not be ready for their depth!) than my behavioral outputs has zero bearing on whether an LLM is a stochastic parrot or not. Just because I can crack it open and understand its activity as a big lump of pretty trivial and comprehensible computations doesn't mean that it doesn't have what amounts to some analogy to my internal state. My own skull could also be cracked open and its contents studied as a mess of neuron activations.jpg; our only obstacles to doing that are logistical and perhaps ethical, especially seeing as Neuralink got a greenlight for human trials from FDA.

I am sometimes accused of opposite things, like extreme materialism or metaphysical whimsy, Russian chauvinism or kowtowing to the West, being a fascist knuckledragger or an effete European intellectual twink (sometimes by the same people). It wouldn't surprise me if some started to believe me a stochastic parrot too. Nuance and uncertainty are penalized.

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