9. Artifical intelligence

Chinese room

• Thought experiment

• Person is trapped in a room with just two windows (it is Searle, he can’t speak Chinese, but there are only Chinese symbols)

• When someone throws a paper with a Chinese word on it, Searle can’t read them, but can find the answer in the manual, then throw it out

• Person outside could think that Chinese room can speak and understand Chinese

• Person inside doesn’t understand Chinese = metaphor to how computers work

Formal proof that computers don’t know language

• John R. Searle, “John R. Searle”, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, 1997

1. Programs are formal (syntactical).

2. Minds have contents (semantics).

3. Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.

4. Programs are not minds. = computers cannot think

There are not premises, it’s just a thought of Searle, we actually cannot know if he’s right or not and we have no proof

Legacy

“I hope we have recovered from the behaviourist phase in the philosophy of mind. I think we have overcome it, and I think we have pretty much overcome a similar mistake, the computationalism phase. Just as it is wrong to think the mind is nothing but behaviour and dispositions to behaviour, so it is wrong to think the mind is nothing but a computer program or a set of computer programs. These were disastrously wrong turns, but as I said, I think we are overcoming them.” (Julian Baggini, "Ten by Ten", The Philosophers’ Magazine, 2008)

objections:

1. thought experiments – are these true? We can imagine everything

2. system objection – we don’t know whether the person in Chinese room understands, but the whole system might be a thinking object

3. syntactic semantics

Helen Keller (1880-1968)

• an American writer, lecturer and activist

• when 19 months old, she contracted an illness that left her both deaf and blind

• with help of her instructor Anne Sullivan she learnt to communicate in tactile signing

• the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree

• William J. Rapaport, “How Helen Keller Used Syntactic Semantics to Escape from a Chinese Room”, Minds and Machines, 2006

Syntax and semantics

• Charles Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, 1938

• syntax is the study of relations among the members of a single set

• semantics is the study of relations between two sets

Syntactic semantics

“Syntactic semantics claims that first-person understanding is just this sort of syntactic manipulation, and the more ways there are to ‘manipulate the terms’, the more understanding there will be.” (Rapaport, p.393)

• Helen Keller's semantic understanding came via linking of internal representations of two external experiences – touching and signing

Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, 1980

Questions:

1. What does “Gedankenexperiment” mean?

2. Who is in the Chinese Room?

3. How does the person deal with Chinese symbols?

4. What is the conclusion of the example?