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by simiones 1651 days ago
Are you referring to the person sending its question to the Chinese Room as "the guy being duped"?

If so, if they pose a question in Chinese and obtain a meaningful answer in Chinese, in what way are they "being duped"? You would only call them "being duped" if you believe that the answer is somehow meaningfully different from what a real Chinese-speaking human would have given, which I and many others do not accept.
1 comments
huetius 1650 days ago
He is duped because the system has no understanding, yet he believes it does[0]. A counterfeiter who evades detection is not a mint.

[0] I believe that the original thought experiment was intended to lead to this conclusion, but in popular culture and in the above post, is marshaled towards the opposite end.

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tsimionescu 1650 days ago
The whole point of Turing's original Immitation Game thought experiment, that Searle turned to understanding of Chinese rather than the more abstract notion of "thought", is that there is no reason to distinguish between what a person who answers questions does and what a machine that would give the same answers would do: they are both "thought" by any possible measure, as long as we accept that they produce the exact same outcomes.

Similarly, as long as we accept that that person outside the room can't distinguish by any means of inside the room there is a speaker of Chinese or a speaker of English following the magical Chinese-answering algorithm, then the distinction is, by definition, meaningless. There is no 'duping' because the notion of 'understanfing Chinese' as apart from 'runnkng the algorithm' is meaningless.

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huetius 1650 days ago
I don’t know. To me, to assert that there is no meaningful difference between a thing and what we know to be an artificial imitation of that thing is to assert that there’s no meaningful difference between truth and lies, so long as the lies are convincing enough.
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tsimionescu 1650 days ago
Is there a meaningful difference between a car and a horse as a means of transport? Is a car an artificial imitation of a horse?

The assertion of the Imitation Game is that IF the computer is equivalent to the person in the game, then they are like the car and the horse.

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