[Wittrs] Re: What the Man in the Room Knows (and when does he know it?)
- From: Gordon Swobe <gts_2000@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 08:51:08 -0700 (PDT)
> Where in anything Searle writes do you see him saying the guy is the system.
Read the paper, Stuart! I gave you the link.
Better yet, I'll post the relevant section. Hold on while I cut and paste it.
Okay thanks for waiting.
1. The Systems Reply (Berkeley). "While it is true that the individual person
who is locked in the room does not understand the story, the fact is that he is
merely part of a whole system, and the system does understand the story. The
person has a large ledger in front of him in which are written the rules, he
has a lot of scratch paper and pencils for doing calculations, he has ‘data
banks’ of sets of Chinese symbols. Now, understanding is not being ascribed to
the mere individual; rather it is being ascribed to this whole system of which
he is a part."
My response to the systems theory is quite simple: Let the individual
internalize all of these elements of the system. He memorizes the rules in the
ledger and the data banks of Chinese symbols, and he does all the calculations
in his head. The individual then incorporates the entire system. There isn’t
anything at all to the system that he does not encompass. We can even get rid
of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing
of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn’t
anything in the system that isn’t in him. If he doesn’t understand, then there
is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him.
Actually I feel somewhat embarrassed to give even this answer to the systems
theory because the theory seems to me so implausible to start with. The idea is
that while a person doesn’t understand Chinese, somehow the conjunction of that
person and bits of paper might understand Chinese. It is not easy for me to
imagine how someone who was not in the grip of an ideology would find the idea
at all plausible. Still, I think many people who are committed to the ideology
of strong AI will in the end be inclined to say something very much like this;
so let us pursue it a bit further. According to one version of this view, while
the man in the internalized systems example doesn’t understand Chinese in the
sense that a native Chinese speaker does (because, for example, he doesn’t know
that the story refers to restaurants and hamburgers, etc.), still "the man as a
formal symbol manipulation system" really does understand Chinese. The
subsystem of the man
that is the formal symbol manipulation system for Chinese should not be
confused with the subsystem for English.
So there are really two subsystems in the man; one understands English, the
other Chinese, and "it’s just that the two systems have little to do with each
other." But, I want to reply, not only do they have little to do with each
other, they are not even remotely alike. The subsystem that understands English
(assuming we allow ourselves to talk in this jargon of "subsystems" for a
moment) knows that the stories are about restaurants and eating hamburgers, he
knows that he is being asked questions about restaurants and that he is
answering questions as best he can by making various inferences from the
content of the story, and so on. But the Chinese system knows none of this.
Whereas the English subsystem knows that "hamburgers" refers to hamburgers, the
Chinese subsystem knows only that "squiggle squiggle" is followed by "squoggle
squoggle." All he knows is that various formal symbols are being introduced at
one end and manipulated according to rules
written in English, and other symbols are going out at the other end. The
whole point of the original example was to argue that such symbol manipulation
by itself couldn’t be sufficient for understanding Chinese in any literal sense
because the man could write "squoggle squoggle" after "squiggle squiggle"
without understanding anything in Chinese. And it doesn't meet that argument to
postulate subsystems within the man, because the subsystems are no better off
than the man was in the first place; they still don't have anything even
remotely like what the English-speaking man (or subsystem) has. Indeed, in the
case as described, the Chinese subsystem is simply a part of the English
subsystem, a part that engages in meaningless symbol manipulation according to
rules in English.
Let us ask ourselves what is supposed to motivate the systems reply in the
first place; that is, what independent grounds are there supposed to be for
saying that the agent must have a subsystem within him that literally
understands stories in Chinese? As far as I can tell the only grounds are that
in the example I have the same input and output as native Chinese speakers and
a program that goes from one to the other. But the whole point of the examples
has been to try to show that that couldn't be sufficient for understanding, in
the sense in which I understand stories in English, because a person, and hence
the set of systems that go to make up a person, could have the right
combination of input, output, and program and still not understand anything in
the relevant literal sense in which I understand English. The only motivation
for saying there must be a subsystem in me that understands Chinese is that I
have a program and I can pass the Turing test;
I can fool native Chinese speakers. But precisely one of the points at issue
is the adequacy of the Turing test. The example shows that there could be two
"systems," both of which pass the Turing test, but only one of which
understands; and it is no argument against this point to say that since they
both pass the Turing test they must both understand, since this claim fails to
meet the argument that the system in me that understands English has a great
deal more than the system that merely processes Chinese. In short, the systems
reply simply begs the question by insisting without argument that the system
must understand Chinese.
Furthermore, the systems reply would appear to lead to consequences that are
independently absurd. If we are to conclude that there must be cognition in me
on the grounds that I have a certain sort of input and output and a program in
between, then it looks like all sorts of noncognitive subsystems are going to
turn out to be cognitive. For example, there is a level of description at which
my stomach does information processing, and it instantiates any number of
computer programs, but I take it we do not want to say that it has any
understanding (cf. Pylyshyn 1980). But if we accept the systems reply, then it
is hard to see how we avoid saying that stomach, heart, liver, and so on are
all understanding subsystems, since there is no principle way to distinguish
the motivation for saying the Chinese subsystem understands from saying that
the stomach understands. It is, by the way, not an answer to this point to say
that the Chinese system has information
as input and output and the stomach has food and food products as input and
output, since from the point of view of the agent, from my point of view, there
is no information in either the food or the Chinese—the Chinese is just so many
meaningless squiggles. The information in the Chinese case is solely in the
eyes of the programmers and the interpreters, and there is nothing to prevent
them from treating the input and output of my digestive organs as information
if they so desire.
This last point bears on some independent problems in strong AI, and it is
worth digressing for a moment to explain it. If strong AI is to be a branch of
psychology, then it must be able to distinguish those systems that are
genuinely mental from those that are not. It must be able to distinguish the
principles on which the mind works from those on which nonmental systems work;
otherwise it will offer us no explanations of what is specifically mental about
the mental. And the mental-nonmental distinction cannot be just in the eye of
the beholder but it must be intrinsic to the systems; otherwise it would be up
to any beholder to treat people as nonmental and, for example, hurricanes as
mental if he likes. But quite often in the AI literature the distinction is
blurred in ways that would in the long run prove disastrous to the claim that
AI is a cognitive inquiry. McCarthy, for example, writes. "Machines as simple
as thermostats can be said to have
beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines
capable of problem solving performance" (McCarthy 1979). Anyone who thinks
strong AI has a chance as a theory of the mind ought to ponder the implications
of that remark. We are asked to accept it as a discovery of strong AI that the
hunk of metal on the wall that we use to regulate the temperature has beliefs
in exactly the same sense that we, our spouses, and our children have beliefs,
and furthermore that "most" of the other machines in the room—telephone, tape
recorder, adding machine, electric fight switch—also have beliefs in this
literal sense. It is not the aim of this article to argue against McCarthy's
point, so I will simply assert the following without argument. The study of the
mind starts with such facts as that humans have beliefs, while thermostats,
telephones, and adding machines don't. If you get a theory that denies this
point you have produced a
counterexample to the theory and the theory is false. One gets the impression
that people in AI who write this sort of thing think they can get away with it
because they don't really take it seriously, and they don't think anyone else
will either. I propose, for a moment at least, to take it seriously. Think hard
for one minute about what would be necessary to establish that that hunk of
metal on the wall over there had real beliefs, beliefs with direction of fit,
propositional content, and conditions of satisfaction; beliefs that had the
possibility of being strong beliefs or weak beliefs; nervous, anxious, or
secure beliefs; dogmatic, rational, or superstitious beliefs; blind faiths or
hesitant cogitations; any kind of beliefs. The thermostat is not a candidate.
Neither is stomach, liver, adding machine, or telephone. However, since we are
taking the idea seriously, notice that its truth would be fatal to strong AI's
claim to be a science of the mind.
For now the mind is everywhere. What we wanted to know is what distinguishes
the mind from thermostats and livers. And if McCarthy were right, strong AI
wouldn't have a hope of telling us that.
-gts
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