[curious_yogurt]

It seems to me that the argument is not meant to address the value judgements of people doing work in applied ML.

The basic idea of the Chinese Room is that the Turing Test is inadequate—such that even if a machine could pass the test, we would not be permitted to infer that such a machine is intelligent. This is significant for the distinction between syntax and semantics, as well as any mechanical account of mind that integrates the results of computational logic. And indeed it does seem like many people do wonder about the nature of machine intelligence and about whether we can give a coherent account of the mind from a mechanical perspective. So perhaps some people doing work in applied ML do not care about these questions; but it does not follow from this that such questions are without qualification uninteresting or worthy of being considered.

[anigbrowl]

But it's garbage. The whole proposition is that if we reduce the human to the role of an automaton (while still retaining our prior knowledge of their humanity) we can get out of explaining how this perfect Chinese conversation-system is supposed to work by saying 'ha, there was a human in the machine the whole time!' - an extremely obvious bait-and-switch.

Also, reflect on the fact that while this isn't supposed to work in real time, the thought experiment calls for the human to be able to operate this conversation-machine by following the exhaustive instructions but without absorbing any information about the system they're operating, such that if they are let out of the Chinese room and handed some Chinese text on paper, it will supposedly be meaningless to them.

The whole idea has so many inherent flaws that I'm perplexed that it was ever taken seriously.

[garquis]

Good evaluation. Searle’s Chinese room argument always seems to hit a nerve with many on HN, with lots of outright diamissal. Whether or not it’s wrong, it’s intent is often just misunderstood. If I remember correctly Searle isn’t arguing against the possibility of a computational machine equal in function to a biological “brain”. So no real need to take it as a slight against ml/ai work. Searle’s intrests are in phil of mind and language, so his interest in questions of mind/consciousness and semantic meaning aren’t going to have too much to bear on applied ML.