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guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don't think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I've heard people saying that the Chinese Room is nonsense because it's not actually possible, at least for thought experiment purposes, to create a complete set of rules for verbal communication. There's always a lot of ambiguity that needs to be weighed and addressed. The guy in the room would have to be making decisions about interpretation and intent. He'd have to have theory of mind.
The Chinese Room argument for any sort of thing that people would commonly call a 'computer' to not be able to have an understanding is either rooted on them just engaging in endless goalpost movement for what it means to 'understand' something (in which case this is obviously silly), or in the fact that they assume that only things with nervous systems can have qualia, and that understanding belongs to qualia (in which case this is something that can be concluded without the Chinese Room argument in the first place).
In any case, Chinese Room is not really relevant to the topic of if considering brains to be computers is somehow erroneous.
My understanding was that the point of the chinese room was that a deterministic system with a perfect set of rules could produce the illusion of consciousness without ever understanding what it was doing? Is that not analogous to our discussion?
At the very least some people are trying to use the Chinese Room thought experiment as an argument against the brain-as-computer analogy/framework.
Is it fair to say we both think the chinese room is a poor thought experiment that doesn't actually do what it claims to do?
I suppose so. At least when it comes to the Chinese Room being used as an argument against brain-as-computer analogies/frameworks.