by IanCal | 2025-10-17 09:26:54+00:00
I have been engaging in good faith but to be honest am a little frustrated at having to continually point out what the actual chinese room thought experiment is. I think you have continually made a very important error with it.

> What goes on inside matters a lot if you want a sense of certainty. This is simply a trivial logical point

And yet entirely unrelated to this thought experiment. His point is not that the book isn't big enough, that the man inside the room will trip up at some point, or anything of the sort.

Now you might have a different argument about this all than Searle, and that's entirely fine. I'm saying that Searles definition of understanding is utterly pointless because he defines it as one that is not related to the measurable actions of a system but related to the way in which it works internally.

> The premise of the argument is that the Chinese Room passes the Turing Test for Chinese.

...

> enough to pass the test in some context but fails to emulate the brain perfectly

No. That is a far weaker argument than Searle makes. His argument is not that it'll be hard to tell, or convincing but you can tell the difference, or most people would be fooled.

From Searle, let's dig into this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071210043312/http://members.ao...

> from tile point of view of somebody outside the room in which I am locked—my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers.

Already we get to the point of being indistinguishable.

> I have inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker,

Again indistinguishable.

And then he doubles down on this to the point of fully emulating the brain not being enough

> imagine that instead of a monolingual man in a room shuffling symbols we have the man operate an elaborate set of water pipes with valves connecting them. When the man receives the Chinese symbols, he looks up in the program, written in English, which valves he has to turn on and off. Each water connection corresponds to a synapse in the Chinese brain, and the whole system is rigged up so that after doing all the right firings, that is after turning on all the right faucets, the Chinese answers pop out at the output end of the series of pipes.

Searle has a problem - he looks at two different systems and says there is understanding in one and not in another. Then he ties himself in knots trying to distinguish between the two.

> 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.

He cannot at all accept any sort of combination, he can't accept any concept of understanding being anything but binary. He cannot accept that it perhaps is not a useful term at all.

> in this paper I have tried to show that a system could have input and output capabilities that duplicated those of a native Chinese speaker and still not understand Chinese, regardless of how it was programmed

A programmed system *cannot* understand. It doesn't matter how it operates or how well, and again duplicating the capabilities of a real person.

As far as I can tell, since he leans heavily into the physical aspect, if we had two machines:

1. Inputs are received via whatever sensors, go through a physical set of components, and drive motors/actuators

2. Inputs are received via whatever sensors, go through a chip running an exact simulation of those same components, and drive motors/actuators

then machine 1 could understand but machine 2 could not because it has a program running rather than just being a physical thing.

Despite the fact that both simply follow the laws of physics, the very concept of a program is just how certain physical things are arranged.

To go back to my point because I'm rather frustrated yet again just pointing out what Searle explicitly says:

Searle defines understanding in a way that makes it, to me, entirely useless. It provides by definition no predictive power and can by definition not impact anything we want to do.

I am not arguing which of these things understands. I'm saying the term as a whole isn't very useful, and Searles definition has been pushed by him to a point of being entirely useless because he starts by insisting that certain things cannot understand.