[Wittrs] Re: Ontologically Basic Ambiguity: Mode of Existence
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:53:27 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Gordon Swobe <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> > His job in the room is to pretend to be a mindless CPU and go through
> > certain rotes steps like a CPU would.
>
> No, his job as the system, OR as the man in the system, is to try with all
> his might and with all his resources to understand what those darned Chinese
> symbols mean.
>
No. Where do you think Searle says anything about his trying to understand
Chinese as being a feature of the system? Does a CPU "try" to understand
Chinese? If it did, we would say it already has intentionality, one of the
features we consider an aspect of what we mean by consciousness, in which case
the question of whether the CPU understands would be moot!
> He can't understand them, not even when he contains the entire system.
> Neither he nor anything in him understand the symbols, because there exists
> nothing in the room that does not exist in him and nothing in room can
> understand the symbols.
>
His trying to understand Chinese is irrelevant. He is just playing the role of
a rote mechanism, matching symbol to symbol! I'm sorry but this is a complete
misreading of the Chinese Room thought experiment.
As to the relevance of there being anything in the room that understands, well
that is precisely my point vis a vis the third premise of the CRA! The fact
that there is nothing in the room (no constituent or constituent process of the
system) that understands
is NOT a demonstration that those constituents or constituent processes
(depending on how we characterize this), cannot understanding if combined in
the right way.
> Even if strong AI=true, a strong AI system could not understand Chinese
> symbols solely by virtue of implementing a program for manipulating them
> according to syntactic rules.
>
> Think about that Stuart. Even if.
>
> -gts
>
I have thought about it, Gordon. That's why I hold the position I now hold.
This really hinges on what it means to understand. If understanding is just
making connections in different ways, connections that build various pictures
and connect them through a network of associated links, then this is nothing a
computer could not accomplish, though it would have to be a computer with
massive capacity for receiving and retaining information and for performing
different functions with that information.
Think of the man in that cartoon looking at the Chinese character for horse and
thinking about a horse. What is he doing? He's picturing certain features to
himself. He's recalling an image, in a recall process that starts with a link
between the abstract symbol and some particular retained mental image and then
which branches out in ways the cartoon itself cannot show.
For instance, along with the mental picture of the horse he presumably has some
other things, e.g., bits of knowledge about what horses are (mammals, four
legged, long faces, rideable, sweaty when you run them, herbivores, etc.) which
is associated with that picture, as well as what he has learned in more indiret
ways about horses (e.g., in terms of history: mankind tamed them, they came
from a smaller animal called eohippus, they were initially brought to North
America by the conquistadors, the American Indians learned to ride those that
had gone wild and became great plains warriors, Alexander the Great rode a
horse called Bucephalus, etc., etc.)
The links are, in principle, endless, and to the extent we share a bunch of
them in varying degrees we have common understandings of what the symbol(s) for
horse and the word "horse" mean.
Ask someone a general question about horses and you'll get different answers
but some the same and to the extent you get a decent amount of answers you
share with the person you questioned, there will be common understanding.
So what then is understanding? It's being able to take any input and place it
into a network of these associations. There is no reason in principle, that I
can see, that a computer could not do this given enough capacity and the right
programming (to enable all these different pictures to be built, retained and
accessed/used). And, if so, then what we call understanding is nothing more
than a feature or property of such a complex system.
The fact that we cannot look at any of the component processes of such a system
and say aha, here is the understanding in this particular stand-alone process
does NOT preclude our finding it in a combination of such processes.
Searle's CRA depends on the notion that the understanding MUST be a feature of
a particular constituent process and completely disregards the possibility that
it might be a systemwide funcion.
SWM
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