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Searle's whole Chinese Room argument is based on the notion that a Turing-test-passable system for processing Chinese input and responding with syntactically correct Chinese output can be engineered, but the man inside the room won't know what he's doing. This is flawed in two ways. First, it assumes the man in the room can't learn anything about the system he's manipulating and eventually draw inferences about its grammar, which I think is bogus. Now true, you could sit in the box for a long time and not learn how to speak Chinese because you haven't learned the sounds that are associated with various Chinese characters. But eventually, after sufficient practice, you'd be able to read and write Chinese effectively, and I argue that you'd be able to derive the semantics by inference. I am arguing this on general principle, though having spent some time studying Chinese from books but not speaking much of it, I'm going to throw in 2 cents worth of empirical experience as well. The other objection is a deeper one, made via a reductio ad absurdum; if a person can't learn Chinese this way, does an English speaker really understand English? Sure, s/he has all the appearance of comprehension and can conduct a conversation in person or via the written word, but how do we know the person isn't just mindlessly manipulating a set of rules that has been internalized since youth? Indeed, given the lack of critical thinking some people exhibit, there might even be some truth to this! but this is the heart of the problem - there's nothing about the Chinese Room argument that can't be restated as an English Room argument and used to deny the sentience of a native English speaker. And now we've come right back to Cartesian arguments about whether there is some particular seat of consciousness within the brain, some part that is more vital than others and which comprises the brain's 'driver's seat' - whether that's the pineal gland (Descartes), the corpus callosum, the anterior hippocampal gyrus (Jaynes) or what-have-you. Putting this in the context of thermostatic beliefs, I see Searle's point about the thermostat not really believing anything...but then if I believe 'it is too hot/cold in here' am I having a real belief or is this just a convenient abstraction of my aggregate levels of cellular ATP and physical work levels to keep my body functioning, making my brain little more than the thermostat for my organs which is where 'the real action' of consciousness is taking place. Essentially, I'm abstracting Doug Hofstadter's elaborate refutation of Searle on Godel Escher Bach; I'm with Hofstadter and Dennett in being a materialist proponent of strong AI, and think Searle's argument is isomorphic to the 'god of the gaps' argument made by intelligent design proponents. I haven't read Nagel's new book yet, and I'll give it a whirl, but since these arguments are essentially philosophical rather than empirical I don't anticipate any sudden conversions. In turn, I think you ought to try Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness in the Brakdown of the Bicameral Mind. |
Thanks. I'll buy it and read it.