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quantumcarl
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Here is a good puzzle for the Artifical Intellegence buffs in the crowd. The premise is known as the China Room and doesn't have Jane Fonda or Jack Lemon in the cast... in fact it only has some Chinese Characters that hold any of the attention during this little drama.
Here is the situation explained with a bit of background on John Searle.
If these ideas spur any thoughts, please feel free to share them in this thread on the differences between human thoughts and physical events such as brain states... if any.
Here is the situation explained with a bit of background on John Searle.
Name:
John Searle
Dates:
Born: 1932 in Denver, Colorado
Died: n/a
Biography:
John Searle is an American philosopher who is best known for his work on the human mind and human consciousness. According to Searle, the human mind and human consciousness cannot be reduced simply to physical events and brain states.
Searle is particularly well known for developing a thought experiment called the "Chinese Room" argument. With this, he thought he could demonstrate that no computer could ever be made which could really "think" in the way we do - specifically, that it could never acquire an "understanding" of events and processes.
Imagine sitting alone in the room with a huge book full of Chinese characters. Every so often, someone pushes a piece of paper under the door. You take this paper and find that it has Chinese characters on it. Your job is to match up the characters on the paper with the same characters in the book - in doing so, you fill out a new piece of paper with different Chinese characters on it. You don't understand any Chinese, but you know how to fill out the piece of paper by simply taking the appropriate characters from the book.
This, according to Searle, models the behavior of a computer - taking input, putting it through a set of formal rules, and thereby producing new output. Because you don't understand Chinese, you have no idea that the incoming pieces of paper have questions on them and the book is providing you with answers to those questions. As a matter of fact, people on the outside find the answers to be especially insightful and, at times, witty. As far as they are concerned, the room contains a person who understands Chinese.
According to Searle, however, there is no understanding of Chinese present - just a set of formal rules which, if complex enough, can mimic the appearance of genuine understanding. Searle thus concludes that this is all computers will ever be able to accomplish: mimicry which can fool us into thinking that they understand things.
A number of objections have been raised about his conclusion, including the idea that while the room is supposed to be analogous to a computer, then the room should also be analogous to the entire brain. Thus, although the individual in the room does not understand Chinese, neither do any of the individual cells in our brains. A person's understanding of Chinese is an emergent property of the brain and not a property possessed by anyone part. Similarly, understanding is an emergent property of the entire system contained in the room, even though it is not a property of anyone component in the room - person, book, or paper.
If these ideas spur any thoughts, please feel free to share them in this thread on the differences between human thoughts and physical events such as brain states... if any.