Chinese Room Experiment Question..
John Searle, a philosopher, says strong artificial intelligence cant exist in his writing Minds, Brains and Progams. A computer can never really understand what is being said to it.
To show his point, Searle offers what is called The Chinese Room Experiment. Searle says to imagine a person alone in a room sitting at a table. On the table are two separate stacks of Chinese writing, lets say one stack is questions and the other is answers to the questions. The person does not know any Chinese whatsoever, so the symbols are all meaningless to him. However, there is a book (the book here is what would be a computer's program) written in English with instructions on how to match the symbols in the two stacks of Chinese writing.
So, the person picks up a symbol from the question stack (the same as a human asking a computer something), looks at his English instructions, and then picks out the appropriate Chinese symbol to match it too. (A computer's answer to the human's question.) To an outsider who might slip pieces of paper of Chinese writing under the door to person at the table, and he slips back an appropriate Chinese response (because of his English guidelines) it looks like whoever is in the room understands Chinese. But he doesnt at all....
Frank Tipler, in his lame book The Physics of Immortality, said The Chinese Room Experiment was bogus because a person could never hand-simulate a computer program at the speeds and whatnot a computer could. Well, no shit. But I thought the Chinese Room was just an analogy to illustrate how computers are operating and not understanding. An analogy. Am I missing something? Because Tipler saying the analogy could never happen in real life...how does that prove Searle's argument against AI is wrong? I thought it was just an analogy...someone help me.
Please forgive me if I am totally missing something. I could just be stupid.
To show his point, Searle offers what is called The Chinese Room Experiment. Searle says to imagine a person alone in a room sitting at a table. On the table are two separate stacks of Chinese writing, lets say one stack is questions and the other is answers to the questions. The person does not know any Chinese whatsoever, so the symbols are all meaningless to him. However, there is a book (the book here is what would be a computer's program) written in English with instructions on how to match the symbols in the two stacks of Chinese writing.
So, the person picks up a symbol from the question stack (the same as a human asking a computer something), looks at his English instructions, and then picks out the appropriate Chinese symbol to match it too. (A computer's answer to the human's question.) To an outsider who might slip pieces of paper of Chinese writing under the door to person at the table, and he slips back an appropriate Chinese response (because of his English guidelines) it looks like whoever is in the room understands Chinese. But he doesnt at all....
Frank Tipler, in his lame book The Physics of Immortality, said The Chinese Room Experiment was bogus because a person could never hand-simulate a computer program at the speeds and whatnot a computer could. Well, no shit. But I thought the Chinese Room was just an analogy to illustrate how computers are operating and not understanding. An analogy. Am I missing something? Because Tipler saying the analogy could never happen in real life...how does that prove Searle's argument against AI is wrong? I thought it was just an analogy...someone help me.
Please forgive me if I am totally missing something. I could just be stupid.