[DonaldFisk]

Neural networks modify their behaviour by changing their data. Any non-trivial program does that. Some GOFAI programs (e.g. Eurisko) could modify their instructions, not just their data.

Searle's argument is confusing, but how the program in the Chinese Room is implemented doesn't matter. His argument is solely against strong AI. He claims that the Chinese Room (or a suitably programmed computer) cannot be conscious of understanding Chinese in the same way that people can. He doesn't deny that a suitably programmed computer could, in principle, behave as if it understood Chinese, even if it wasn't conscious of anything at all.

However, the machine translation program mentioned in the article behaves as if it understands Chinese only within the limited context of the translation. It wouldn't be able to answer wider questions about things mentioned in an article it had just translated.

Previously it was thought that machine translation systems would have to understand the text they were translating in the way a person does, to produce a useful translation, but that's now shown not to be true. Without hindsight, it's a surprising result, but less surprising when you think of translation as pattern recognition, and think of how a person might go about translating text on a highly technical subject they don't understand.

[Tobba_]

It's a completely meaningless and plain stupid argument though. There's no reason to believe human consciousness is special and that "understanding" Chinese is at all related to it. One can speculate that the perception of consciousness is simply the product of some form of introspective sensory system and internally-directed actions, of which the former ironically clearly doesn't quite work when it comes to language (or it wouldn't be as much of a reverse-engineering exercise). Nothing really stops you from throwing that into your system and having it consciously understand chinese, assuming it already maintains state.

You can however make a fairly solid argument that a CNN alone (as used in image/object recognition) is fundamentally incapable of dealing with images (but maybe not language), on the assumption that it can be faithfully described as Satan's boolean satisfiability problem, then by virtue of complexity theory it can only be solved in constant time with a sufficiently massive lookup table (which there wouldn't be enough atoms in the universe to store). Microsoft are actually dealing with this in their system by repeatedly applying the network and revisioning the text.

Regardless though, accurate NLP is going to come down to managing to codify how humans deals with objects, concepts and actions, because that's what the languages encode; GOFAI wasn't really too off (and the original effort was doomed from the start by the state of hardware and linguistics). Consider how distinguishing objects as masculine-feminine-neuter and animate-inanimate(-human) is universal (but doesn't necessarily affect the grammar), and that the latter is based purely on how complex/incomprehensible the behaviour of something is (unlike grammatical gender which seems to be fairly arbitrary). Of course that's arguable, but you can see animacy appear in english word choices (unrelated to anthromorphic metaphors) and in how "animate" objects tend to be referred to as having intent. You could try and figure all this out the wrong way around using statistical brute force and copious amounts of text, but that's pretty roundabout isn't it?

(Also, the assumption that an objects animacy is determined by predictability offers a pretty concise explanation of why the idea of human consciousness being produced by simpl(er) interacting systems often fails to compute so spectacularily, why most programmers appear to be immune to that, and also why the illusion that image recognition CNNs perform their intended function is so strong (regardless of how useful they are, the failures make it blatant that they're only looking at texture and low-level features, and are extremely sensitive to noise, which is the opposite of what anyone intended))