| I believe that it is straight forward to show how Searle's Chinese Room argument can be applied to ChatGPT. The idea is not the "process" for building the rules but the "process" where the rules are applied. True sentience requires a "true" understanding of the information that is being presented (otherwise, it is not reflective of sentience but rather trickery). The Chinese Room applies because ChatGPT or any other computer is generating text purely through logic, that is, logical rules. To make this point clear, let's assume just for argument's sake that at some quantum level, the electrical activity underlying a computer is partially sentient (I am not making this claim -- just using it as an example). Even if this were true, this would not prove that the sentience is involved with the text being generated by the same computer. This underlying sentience would be like the "person" in the Chinese room. The text generated are the Chinese words which would be completely independent from the "sentience" following the rules. Generating text at sufficient complexity to fool the average person does not prove that "sentience" is occurring. Generating text consistently in a way that is only explainable through sentience is what is required. ChatGPT, because it is easily shown to be flawed, does not rise to this level of evidence. In the Chinese Room example, the complexity of what could be displayed by the rulebooks would have a limited complexity (though, the surprise of ChatGPT is that this complexity is greater than many of us would have supposed). Just like the story of Clever Hans the Horse (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans), once the limitation of the process is realized, it becomes clear that there is not "true" understanding of what is generated which means that the rules, in themselves, do not reflect "true" sentience. |