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From: ray@bcsaic.UUCP (Ray Allis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Why the Chinese Room doesn't convince
Keywords: symbols
Message-ID: <18883@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jan 90 22:50:59 GMT
Organization: Boeing Computer Services ATC, Seattle
Lines: 106


John Searle has been telling this story for ten years and I have yet to hear
of a convert.  But, perhaps ironically, through analysis of its failure, it
will yet illuminate us. 

What *is* the difficulty with the Chinese Room story?  

Well, consider; the story is perforce posed by use of symbols; e.g. words on
a page (or a screen); words such as "understand" and "semantics".  Symbols
are after all an important means of communication among humans.

When I read this arrangement of symbols I build up an internal "picture" of
the situation: the room, the baskets of symbols, the man who "does not
understand Chinese".  I can picture "native Chinese speakers" coming up to a
window and passing in slips of paper with, perhaps, questions written on them
in Chinese.  Questions such as "How is the U.S. invasion of Panama different
from the U.S.S.R.'s invasion of Afghanistan?" or "Our daughter just informed
us she's pregnant by her uncle.  What should we do?"  But when I read that
even though nothing in the Room understands Chinese, the Room's "answers" to
the "questions" are "indistinquishable from those of a native Chinese
speaker", my imagination chokes; I can't "fit" that with the mental image I
have built up from the other premises.

To me, the situation described is internally inconsistent.  I can't bring
myself to believe that the Chinese Room will convince native speakers that it
understands Chinese *unless it really does understand Chinese*.  I am forced
to something like the "systems reply", i.e.  either the Room understands, or
it does not perform as well as a native Chinese speaker.  If the Room's
utterances are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker, then
it must understand about as much as that speaker does about the way the world
works, and the human condition.  This is basically a behaviorist view of
"understanding".

Could Searle *mean* something else by the word "understand"?  Maybe he means
the subjective experience of understanding?  For myself, I prefer a
subjective, experiential definition of the "Aha!" feeling when "things fall
into place", or the comfortable, secure feeling when there are few or no
unknowns in my environment, and for everyone else a behavioristic definition.
After all, I have no direct access to *their* experiences.  

Well, at bottom, my problem is that I cannot be certain that I *understand*
precisely what John *means* by the symbol "understand".  We cannot *know*
that we concur on the MEANING (semantics) of "understand".  Or it may be
that, as in my case, we hold more than one definition, and neither of us can
be certain which definition is intended in any given situation.  

There is nothing intrinsic in the words to determine their meaning.  This is
true in general for symbols.  We (John and I) must hope that we have
developed similar meanings, each through our individual experience, for the
symbols we use.  We depend on this assumption for communication with each
other.  We can send symbols back and forth, but not meanings.  

My inability to fit this set of premises into a coherent picture is not a
formal, logical problem.  It has nothing to do with the "shape" or
arrangement of the symbols, it is a perceived contradiction in the "mental
image" evoked (from my memories of experiences) by the premises.  

And this is the normal situation: we speak and write, we listen and read, and
nowhere is there logical certainty that we attach identical meaning to the
symbols.  In fact, we suspect that identity is quite unlikely, but with
practice, *from experience* we infer (induce) that we are communicating, and
assisted by feedback from our fellow conversants, we refine and sharpen until
we judge that we all "understand" (or give up in frustration).  That's the
situation each of us is in vis-a-vis the others.  (Wait a minute, are you
really people?)

Inside the Chinese Room there is only a "symbol system"; only marked pieces
of paper are manipulated; there are no meanings present.  There is no way for
the Chinese Room to "build up a picture" from an incoming "message" or
"question".  Actually these are "questions" only when they are outside the
Room, because their meanings exist only in minds.  Inside the Room there is
no possibility for contradiction and the notion of consistency does not
apply.  There is no "reality check".  (This is why I don't believe a Chinese
Room could fool anybody.)  Inside *any* symbol system it is the same; there
is no meaning present.  "Understanding" in the sense of "apprehending
meaning" clearly cannot exist inside a symbol system.  

So the Chinese room argument fails from the very error that it is intended to
illustrate.  We are handed a bag of symbols which are really not symbolic
*of* anything, and we are to "understand" that we have an illustration of
a hypothesis concerning whether certain kinds of systems can "understand",
and decide whether we agree and why.  As my son says, "Give me a *break*!"

I think the evidence is *overwhelmingly against* the hypothesis that symbol
systems are sufficient for the duplication of human intelligent behavior.  I
am always surprised that there are people still trying to build minds from
symbol systems!  I had come to this belief before the PSSH was stated as such
in the Turing Award Lecture,[1] and long before I encountered Searle's
Chinese Room story.

[1] Newell, A., and Simon, H. 1975. Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: 
Symbols and Search. 10th ACM Turing Award Lecture. 

Three notes:

(1) The image is built up from MY EXPERIENCES.  My recall of some room and
some man, or some fuzzy, general image of each.

(2) Similarity (or difference, which is the same thing) is perceived among
the EXPERIENCES, not the symbols.

(3) That's what neuromorphic systems are good for, not "parallel computing"
but the acquisition, recording and recall of EXPERIENCE! 

(4) Isn't it obvious that diagnosis, model-based reasoning, natural language
understanding et. al. MUST be futile with nothing but tokens; no MEANINGS?