You have a cat. The cat meows at you. You do nothing. The cat keeps meowing at you. You offer it food as a guess. The cat stops meowing.
The next day, the cat starts meowing at you again, but slightly different. You give it food. It keeps meowing. You give it a belly rub, the cat stops meowing.
You have inadvertently learned the correct response to two types of cat meows. However, you do not speak cat. Nor does the cat speak human. You are just giving a response it expects for a given input.
Also doesn’t cat only meows when trying to communicate with different species? They are not speaking cat either, they are just hoping you pick up what they want. (in this case it actually shows intent, something a LLM or said chinese room is not capable of doing)
The difference between this and the Chinese Room is that you are attempting to understand what the cat is saying, and making a response that both you and the cat understand. You are attempting to communicate. The Chinese Room is many people who do not understand the input, do not understand the output, and have neither the capability nor the will to do either.
…but does the system that is the Chinese Room (the entire system taken as a whole) understand Chinese?
Any given sufficiently small piece of your brain does not understand English, does no individual neuron in the language center of your brain understanding English mean that you do not understand English? If that understanding is held in the organization and structure of the brain but not in the individual parts, then why can’t the Chinese Room understand Chinese despite no individual component understanding Chinese? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer in a coherent fashion without asserting that knowledge in an organic brain is magical in some fashion, and nothing else counts.
Wait until you consider the concept of philosophical zombies, which is all about pointing out the edges and contours of the hard problem of consciousness. The starting point of that discussion is essentially “Is someone who responds exactly like a regular person would but has no actual subjective experience conscious?” and gets stranger from there.
I always thought it was a bit tragically amusing that LLMs can fool people so readily, because it was essentially proof that P-zombies can exist. And we invented them.
As for the Chinese Room and understanding Chinese, my argument has always been that the chart contains an understanding of Chinese - but as the chart itself cannot think, it does not understand Chinese in the way a person does, and as each person who is in the Chinese Room does not - and cannot - glean meaning from the input they receive or the output that they send out, they have no understanding at all. Understanding also implies being able to adapt the knowledge to new situations, and as the chart that drives the Chinese Room is immutable and cannot accomodate novel scenarios, it does not understand Chinese.
How is that not communication? I know at least 4 different vocalizations for my cats corresponding to different needs/wants. To say that’s not intelligence or communication is very short-sighted, in my opinion.
🤷 🐈
You have a cat. The cat meows at you. You do nothing. The cat keeps meowing at you. You offer it food as a guess. The cat stops meowing.
The next day, the cat starts meowing at you again, but slightly different. You give it food. It keeps meowing. You give it a belly rub, the cat stops meowing.
You have inadvertently learned the correct response to two types of cat meows. However, you do not speak cat. Nor does the cat speak human. You are just giving a response it expects for a given input.
Also doesn’t cat only meows when trying to communicate with different species? They are not speaking cat either, they are just hoping you pick up what they want. (in this case it actually shows intent, something a LLM or said chinese room is not capable of doing)
The difference between this and the Chinese Room is that you are attempting to understand what the cat is saying, and making a response that both you and the cat understand. You are attempting to communicate. The Chinese Room is many people who do not understand the input, do not understand the output, and have neither the capability nor the will to do either.
…but does the system that is the Chinese Room (the entire system taken as a whole) understand Chinese?
Any given sufficiently small piece of your brain does not understand English, does no individual neuron in the language center of your brain understanding English mean that you do not understand English? If that understanding is held in the organization and structure of the brain but not in the individual parts, then why can’t the Chinese Room understand Chinese despite no individual component understanding Chinese? That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer in a coherent fashion without asserting that knowledge in an organic brain is magical in some fashion, and nothing else counts.
Wait until you consider the concept of philosophical zombies, which is all about pointing out the edges and contours of the hard problem of consciousness. The starting point of that discussion is essentially “Is someone who responds exactly like a regular person would but has no actual subjective experience conscious?” and gets stranger from there.
I always thought it was a bit tragically amusing that LLMs can fool people so readily, because it was essentially proof that P-zombies can exist. And we invented them.
As for the Chinese Room and understanding Chinese, my argument has always been that the chart contains an understanding of Chinese - but as the chart itself cannot think, it does not understand Chinese in the way a person does, and as each person who is in the Chinese Room does not - and cannot - glean meaning from the input they receive or the output that they send out, they have no understanding at all. Understanding also implies being able to adapt the knowledge to new situations, and as the chart that drives the Chinese Room is immutable and cannot accomodate novel scenarios, it does not understand Chinese.
How is that not communication? I know at least 4 different vocalizations for my cats corresponding to different needs/wants. To say that’s not intelligence or communication is very short-sighted, in my opinion.
then I dont get the chinese room experiment either