[danielbarla]

> In response to this, Searle argues that it makes no difference. He suggests a variation on the brain simulator scenario: suppose that in the room the man has a huge set of valves and water pipes, in the same arrangement as the neurons in a native Chinese speaker’s brain. The program now tells the man which valves to open in response to input. Searle claims that it is obvious that there would be no understanding of Chinese.

I mean, I guess all arguments eventually boil down to something which is "obvious" to one person to mean A, and "obvious" to me to mean B.

[IanCal]

Same. I feel the Chinese room argument is a nice thing to clarify thinking.

Two systems, one feels intuitively like it understands, one doesn’t. But the two systems are functionally identical.

Therefore either my concept of “understanding” is broken, my intuition is wrong, or the concept as a whole is not useful at the edges.

I think it’s the last one. If a bunch of valves can’t understand but a bunch of chemicals and electrical signals can if it’s in someone’s head then I am simply applying “does it seem like biology” as part of the definition and can therefore ignore it entirely when considering machines or programs.

Searle seems to just go the other way and I don’t under Why.

[siglesias]

First point: if you imagine that the brain is doing something like collapsing the quantum wavefunction, wouldn't you say that this is a functionally relevant difference in addition to an ontologically relevant difference? It's not clear that the characteristic feature of the brain is only to compute in the classical sense. "Understanding," if it leverages quantum mechanics, might also create a guarantee of being here and now (computers and programs have no such guarantees). This is conjecture, but it's meant to stimulate imagination. What we need to get away from is the fallacy that a causal reduction of mental states to "electrical phenomena" means that any set of causes (or any substrate) will do. I don't think that follows.

Second: the philosophically relevant point is that when you gloss over mental states and only point to certain functions (like producing text), you can't even really claim to have fully accounted for what the brain does in your AI. Even if the physical world the brain occupies is practically simulatable, passing a certain speech test in limited contexts doesn't really give you a strong claim to consciousness and understanding if you don't have further guarantees that you're simulating the right aspects of the brain properly. AI, as far as I can tell, doesn't TRY to account for mental states. That's partially why it will keep failing in some critical tasks (in addition to being massively inefficient relative to the brain).

[IanCal]

The Chinese room has the outputs being the same, that’s really key in this.

> consciousness and understanding

After decades of this I’ve settled on the view that these words are near useless for anything specific, only vague pointers to rough concepts. I see zero value in nailing down the exact substrates understanding is possible on without a way of looking at two things and saying which one does and which one doesn’t understand. Searle to me is arguing that it is not possible at all to devise such a test and so his definition is useless.

[siglesias]

He’s not arguing that it’s not possible to devise such a test. He’s saying, lay out the features of consciousness as we understand them, look for what causes them in the brain, look for that causal mechanism in other systems.

Although for whatever it’s worth most modern AIs will tell you they don’t have genuine understanding (eg no sense of what pleasure is or feels like etc aside from human labeling).

[IanCal]

> He’s not arguing that it’s not possible to devise such a test.

The entire point of the thought experiment is that to outside observers it appears the same as if a fluent speaker is in the room. There aren’t questions you can ask to tell the difference.

[siglesias]

That's not the entire point, but it is the a big part of the premise. The entire point, on the contrary, is that the system inside the room does not have anything with conscious understanding of Chinese DESPITE passing the Turing Test. It's highlighting precisely that there's an ontological difference between the apparent behavior of the system and the reality of it.

[danielbarla]

> First point: if you imagine that the brain is doing something like collapsing the quantum wavefunction, wouldn't you say that this is a functionally relevant difference in addition to an ontologically relevant difference?

I can imagine a lot of things, but the argument did not go this far, it left it as "obvious" well before this stage. Also, when I see trivial simulations of our biological machinery yielding results which are _very similar_, e.g. character or shape recognition, I am left wondering if the people talking about quantum wavefunctions are not the ones that are making extraordinary claims, which would require extraordinary evidence. I can certainly find it plausible that these _could_ be one particular way that we could be superior to the electronics / valves of the argument, but I'm not yet convinced it is a differentiator that actually exists.

[siglesias]

The argument doesn’t have to go that far. I think most people have the intuitive, ha, understanding that “understanding” is grounded in some kind of conscious certainty that words have meanings, associations, and even valences like pleasantness or unpleasantness. One of the cruxes of the Chinese Room is that this grounding has physical causes (as all biological phenomena do) rather than computational, purely abstract causes.

There has to be a special motivation to instead cast understanding as “competent use of a given word or concept,” (judged by whom btw?). The practical upshot here is that without this grounding, we keep seeing AI, even advanced AI make trivial mistakes and requires the human to give an account of value (good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant) because these programs obviously don’t have conscious feelings of goodness and badness. Nobody had to teach me that delicious things include Oreos and not cardboard.

[danielbarla]

> Nobody had to teach me that delicious things include Oreos and not cardboard.

Well, no, that came from billions of years of pre-training that just got mostly hardcoded into us, due to survival / evolutionary pressure. If anything, the fact that AI is as far as it is, after less than 100 years of development, is shocking. I recall my uncle trounce our C64 in chess, and go on to explain how machines don't have intuition, and the search space explodes combinatorically, which is why they will never beat a competent human. This was ~10 years before Deep Blue. Oh, sure, that's just a party trick. 10 years ago, we didn't have GPT-style language understanding, or image generation (at least, not widely available nor of middling quality). I wonder what we will have in 10, 20, 100 years - whatever it is, I am fairly confident that architectural improvements will lead to large capability improvements eventually, and that current behavior and limitations are just that, current. So, the argument is that somehow, intuitively they can't ever be truly intelligent or conscious because it's somehow intuitively obvious? I disagree with this argument; I don't think we have any real, scientific idea of what consciousness really is, nor do we have any way to differentiate "real" from "fake".

On the other end of the spectrum, I have seen humans with dementia not able to make sense of the world any more. Are they conscious? What about a dog, rabbit, cricket, bacterium? I am pretty sure at their own level, they certainly feel like they are alive and conscious. I don't have any real answers, but it certainly seems to be a spectrum, and holding on to some magical or esoteric differentiator, like emotions or feelings, seems like wishful thinking to me.

[siglesias]

Your vocabulary presupposes the categories you’re asserting are equivalent. The process of evolution and AI training are vastly different. One confers a survival advantage and is suffused with values that are essential to humans, such as morality, the primacy of vision, taste and smell, etc. AI training is an attempt to transfer functions that allow for human survival and flourishing to objects that are not human. AI training, and especially the Turing Test featured in the Chinese room is about mimicking humans and human evolution is about survival and forms the basis of our aesthetic and moral judgments. One is simply a simulation of the other. Consciousness might not matter to what you concern yourself with as somebody amazed with AI (I am as well), but surely you believe that there is a moral difference between harming a human and harming an LLM, even verbally. What do you think accounts for that, if not consciousness?

[lxgr]

Exactly. Refuting the premise of the Chinese Room is usually a sign of somebody not even willing to entertain the thought experiment. Refuting Searle's conclusion is where interesting philosophical discussions can be had.

Personally, I'd say that there is a Chinese speaking mind in the room (albeit implemented on a most unusual substrate).

[strogonoff]

There are two distinct counter-arguments to this way of debunking the Chinese room experiment, not in any specific order.

First, it is tempting to assume that a bunch of chemicals is the territory, that it somehow gives rise to consciousness, yet that claim is neither substantiated nor even scientific. It is a philosophical view called “monistic materialism” (or sometimes “naive materialism”), and perhaps the main reason this view is popular currently is that people uncritically adopt it following learning natural scientific fields, as if they made some sort of ground truth statements about the underlying reality.

The key to remember is that this is not a valid claim in the scope of natural sciences; this claim belongs to the larger philosophy (the branch often called metaphysics). It is not a useless claim, but within the framework of natural sciences it’s unfalsifiable and not even wrong. Logically, from scientific method’s standpoint, even if it was the other way around—something like in monistic idealism, where perception of time-space and material world is the interface to (map of) conscious landscape, which was the territory and the cause—you would have no way of proving or disproving this, just like you cannot prove or disprove the claim that consciousness arises from chemical processes. (E.g., if somebody incapacitates some part of you involved in cognition, and your feelings or ability to understand would change as a result, it’s pretty transparently an interaction between your mind and theirs, just with some extra steps, etc.)

The common alternatives to monistic materialism include Cartesian dualism (some of us know it from church) and monistic idealism (cf. Kant). The latter strikes me as the more elegant of the bunch, as it grants objective existence to the least amount of arbitrary entities compared to the other two.

It’s not to say that there’s one truly correct map, but just to warn against mistakenly trying to make a statement about objective truth, actual nature of reality, with scientific method as cover. Natural sciences do not make claims of truth or objective reality, they make experimentally falsifiable predictions and build flawed models that aid in creating more experimentally falsifiable predictions.

Second, what scientific method tries to build is a complete, formally correct and provable model of reality, there are some arguments that such model is impossible to create in principle. I.e., there will be some parts of the territory that are not covered by the map, and we might not know what those parts are, because this territory is not directly accessible to us: unlike a landmass we can explore in person, in this case all we have is maps, the perception of reality supplied by our mind, and said mind is, self-referentially, part of the very territory we are trying to model.

Therefore, it doesn’t strike me as a contradiction that a bunch of valves don’t understand yet we do. A bunch of valves, like an LLM, could mostly successfully mimic human responses, but the fact that this system mimics human responses is not an indication of it feeling and understanding like a human does, it’s simply evidence that it works as designed. There can be a very different territory that causes similar measurable human responses to arise in an actual human. That territory, unlike the valves, may not be fully measurable, and it can cause other effects that are not measurable (like feeling or understanding). Depending on the philosophical view you take, manipulating valves may not even be a viable way of achieving a system that understands; it has not been shown that biological equivalent of valves is what causes understanding, all we have shown is that those entities measurably change at the same time with some measurable behavior, which isn’t a causative relationship.

[IanCal]

It's not mostly mimicking, it's exactly identical. That was always the key point. Indistinguishable from the outside, one thing understands and the other doesn't.

I feel like I could make the same arguments about the chinese room except my definition of "understanding" hinges on whether there's a tin of beans in the room or not. You can't tell from the outside, but that's the difference. Both cases with a person inside answering questions act identically and you can never design a test to tell which room has the tin of beans in.

Now you might then say "I don't care if there's a tin of beans in there, it doesn't matter or make any sort of difference for anything I want to do", in which case I'd totally agree with you.

> just like you cannot prove or disprove the claim that consciousness arises from chemical processes.

Like understanding, I haven't seen a particularly useful definition of consciousness that works around the edges. Without that, talking of a claim like this is pointless.

[strogonoff]

> talking of a claim like this is pointless.

Not at all. The confusion you expressed in your original comment stems from that claim. If you want to overcome that confusion, we have to talk about that claim.

Your statement was that it’s unclear how a bunch of valves doesn’t understand, but chemical processes do, and maybe you have a wrong intuition. Well, it appears that your intuition is to make this claim of causality, that some sort of object (e.g., valves or neurons), which you believe is part of objective reality, is what would have to cause understanding to exist.

So, I pointed out that assumption of such causality is not a provable claim, it is part of monistic materialism, which is a philosophical view, not scientific fact.

Further hinting at your tendency to assume monistic materialism is calling the systems “functionally identical”. It’s fairly evident that they are not functionally identical if one of them understands and the other doesn’t; it’s easy to make this mistake if you subconsciously already decide that understanding isn’t really a thing that exists (as many monistic materialists do).

> Like understanding, I haven't seen a particularly useful definition of consciousness that works around the edges.

Inability to define consciousness is fine, because logically circular definitions are difficult. However, lack of definition for the phenomenon is not the same thing as denying its objective existence.

You can escape the necessity to admit its existence by waving it away as an illusion or “not really” existing. Which is absolutely fine, as long as you recognize that it’s simply a workaround to not have to define things (if it’s an illusion, whom does it act on?), that conscious illusionism is just as unfalsifiable and unprovable as any other philosophical view about the nature of reality or consciousness, and that logically it’s quite ridiculous to dismiss as illusion literally the only thing that we empirically have direct unmediated access to.

> It's not mostly mimicking, it's exactly identical.

> Both cases with a person inside answering questions act identically and you can never design a test to tell which room has the tin of beans in.

If you constructed a system A that produces some output, and there is a system B, which you did not construct and which you don't have an full understanding of how it works, which produces identical output but is also believed to produce other output that cannot be measured with current technology (a.k.a. feelings and understanding), you have two options: 1) say that if we cannot measure something today then it certainly doesn’t matter, doesn’t exist, etc., or 2) admit that system A could be a p-zombie.

[IanCal]

> It’s fairly evident that they are not functionally identical

Then you could tell the difference and the thought experiment is broken. The whole point is that outside observers can’t tell. Not that they’re too stupid, that there isn’t a way they could tell, no question they could ask.

> but is also believed to produce other output that cannot be measured with current technology

Are you suggesting that Searle was saying that there was a difference between the rooms and that we just needed more advanced technology to see inside them? Come on.

[strogonoff]

> The whole point is that outside observers can’t tell.

I tried to explain that outside observers may not observe the entirety of what matters, whether due to current technical limitations or fundamental impossibility. In fact, to assume externally observed behaviour (e.g., of a human) is all that matters strikes me as a pretty fringe view.

> Are you suggesting that Searle was saying that there was a difference between the rooms and that we just needed more advanced technology to see inside them

Perhaps you are trying to read too much into what the experiment itself is. I do not treat it as “Searle tried to tell us something this way”. If he wanted to say something more specific he probably had done it in relevant works. The thought experiment however is very clear and describable in a paragraph and is open to possible interpretations, which is what we are doing now. That is the beauty of thought experiments like this.

[IanCal]

I'd be fine if Searle just very simply said "we have a non-material soul and that's why we understand. Anything doing the exact same job but without a soul isn't understanding because understanding is limited entirely to things with souls in my definition".

> A bunch of valves, like an LLM, could mostly successfully mimic human responses,

The argument is not "mostly successfully", it's identically responding. The entire point of the chinese room is that from the outside the two things are impossible to distinguish between.

[strogonoff]

You’re talking about Cartesian mind-body dualism. It’s absolutely fine to not sneak in that view into an otherwise sound thought experiment, as it’s quite irrelevant—the concept of p-zombie from Chinese room experiment holds regardless.

> The argument is not "mostly successfully", it's identically responding.

This is a thought experiment. Thought experiments can involve things that may be impossible. For example, the Star Trek Transporter thought experiment involves an existence of a thing that instantly moves a living being: the point of the experiment is to give rise to a discussion about the nature of consciousness and identity.

Thing not possibly existing is one possible resolution of the paradox. There may be a limitation we are not aware of.

Similarly, in Searle’s experiment, the system that identically responds might never exist, just like the transporter in all likelihood cannot exist.

> The entire point of the chinese room is that from the outside the two things are impossible to distinguish between.

To a blind person, an orange and a dead mouse are impossible to distinguish between from 10 meters away. If you can’t distinguish between two things, it doesn’t mean the things are the same. Ability to understand, self-awareness and consciousness are things we currently cannot measure. You can either say “these things don’t exist” (we will disagree) or you have to say “the systems can be different”.

[IanCal]

You seem confused as to what I’ve said. I know these things cannot exist in reality.

The Chinese room is setup so that you cannot tell the difference from the outside. That’s the point of it.

> If you can’t distinguish between two things, it doesn’t mean the things are the same.

But it does mean that the differences between them are irrelevant to you by definition.

> Ability to understand, self-awareness and consciousness are things we currently cannot measure. You can either say “these things don’t exist”

Unless you have a way they could be measured but we just lack the technology or skill then your definitions are of things that may as well not exist because you cannot define them. They are vague words you use and are fine if you accept you have three major categories “yes and here’s why, no and here’s why and no idea” that’s fine. I am happy saying I’m conscious and the pillow next to me is not. I don’t have a definition clear enough to say yes/no if the pillow was arguing with me.

[siglesias]

I would encourage deeply digging into the intuition that brain states and computer states are the same. Start with what you know, and then work backwards and see whether you still think they aren’t different. For example, we have an intuitive understanding of what kinds of flavors (for us) are delicious versus not. Or what kinds of sounds are pleasant versus not. Etc. If I close my eyes, I can see the color purple. I know that Nutella is delicious, and I can imagine its flavor at will. I share Searle’s intuition that the universe would be a strange place if these feelings of understanding (and pleasantness!) were simply functions not of physical states but of abstract program states. Keep in mind—what counts as a bit is simply a matter of convention. In one computer system, it could be a minute difference in voltage in a transistor. In another, it could be the presence of one element versus another. In another, it could be whether a chamber contains water or not. In another, it could be markings on a page. On and on. On the strong AI thesis, any system that runs steps in this program would not just produce functionally equivalent output to brains, but they would be forced to have mental states too, like imagining the taste of Nutella. To me, it's implausible that symbolic states FORCE mental states, or put another way that mental states are non-physical (we think about how states like pain, euphoria, drunkenness, etc, are physically modulated through drugs..you'd have to modify this to say that they're really modifying symbolic states somehow). Either the Chinese Room is missing something, our understanding of physical reality is incomplete, OR that you have to bite the bullet that the universe creates mental states when systems implement the right program—but then you’re left with the puzzle of how it is that there is a tie between the physical world and the abstract world of symbols (how can causing a mark on a page cause mental states).

So what’s the physical cause for consciousness and understanding that is not computable? If for example you took the hypothesis that “consciousness is a sequence of microtubule-orchestrated collapses of the quantum wavefunction” [1], then you can see a series of physical requirements for consciousness and understanding that forces all conscious beings onto: 1) roughly the same clock (because consciousness shares a cause), and 2) the same reality (because consciousness causes wavefunction collapses). That’s something you could not do merely by simulating certain brain processes in a closed system.

1) Not saying this is correct, but it invites one to imagine that consciousness could have physical requirements that play in some of the oddities of the (shared) quantum world. https://x.com/StuartHameroff/status/1977419279801954744