Xref: utzoo talk.philosophy.misc:3884 comp.ai:6536 Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!umn-d-ub!cs.umn.edu!hougen From: hougen@cs.umn.edu (Dean Hougen) Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,comp.ai Subject: Re: Why the Chinese Room doesn't convince Summary: thought experiment good, sloppiness (and fire) bad! Keywords: functional definitions, understanding, Message-ID: <1990Apr9.063331.15478@cs.umn.edu> Date: 9 Apr 90 06:33:31 GMT References: <23100@mimsy.umd.edu> <1990Mar19.153959.6113@sjuphil.uucp> <0541@sheol.UUCP> <1990Mar26.155415.21756@sjuphil.uucp> <0556@sheol.UUCP> <1990Apr3.162019.27598@maths.tcd.ie> <1990Apr5.202224.27534@caen.en <1990Apr6.14494 Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept. Lines: 126 In article <1990Apr8.160030.1988@cs.umn.edu>, thornley@cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley) writes: >In article <1990Apr6.144947.11473@maths.tcd.ie> ftoomey@maths.tcd.ie (Fergal >Toomey) writes: >>Let me put it like this: suppose the novice >>has brain damage, so that he is incapable of understanding chess, but >>he is capable of carrying out simple instructions. He is also capable >>of speaking English fluently. He is given a long list of instructions >>from Gary Kasparov telling him exactly what move to make in every >>board situation that can possibly arise during a chess game (the number >>of possible board configurations is very, very high, but finite).... > >I am starting to wonder if one of the real problems in these discussions is >the high proportion of impossible thought experiments. The number of possible >board configurations is far too high for any sort of exhaustive search pattern >to be applied within the confines of the known universe. Certainly it is far >too high for one human to go through. > >This is also a problem with Searle's Chinese Room arguments. The man seems to >have no conception of how big a program to simulate human intelligence would >have to be, and how difficult it would be to implement by means of paper and >pencil. Frankly, I don't think that Searle could perform the symbol >manipulations sufficiently accurately to implement such a program. Certainly >he could not memorize the program and the data, as he has stated he could do >in the Scientific American article. My assesment of Searle is less gracious. I believe that he *intentionally* trivializes the problem to win a psychological edge in the argument. >I dislike two consequences of this. First, I think it is intellectually >sloppy, almost to the point of dishonesty. If I were arguing about the >country's transportation network, and I questioned the need for intra-city >roads by saying that people could walk at 20 mph, people would lose all >respect for me. If I argue about artificial intelligence and say I can >implement a human-intelligence simulator mentally, or that I can get Gary >Kasparov to give me written instructions on how to play chess at his level, >I should get quite the same treatment. If you are asking for funding to actually try this crap, of course people should laugh at you. But there is a long and proud history of the use of thought experiments in philosophy, and the use here is not out of line. Here we are not proposing actual solutions to actual problems, but rather asking how our concepts fit to unreal situations in order to get a better handle on our concepts. Although particular examples can get intellectually sloppy (perhaps this one, no offense to any participant intended) or dishonest (e.g. Searle's Chinese Room), many are neither of these, instead being well-reasoned arguments by some of the great thinkers throughout the centuries. Some of them have actually been useful too! :) >Second, it trivializes the problems >involved. Programming a chess computer or a human-intelligence simulator >is not a small feat, cannot be duplicated by memorizing lists of rules or >board positions, and shouldn't be treated as if they can. I agree with you here. It is all too easy to allow the problem being solved to be trivialized. I think that it is possible to use these thought experiments without allowing oneself to be distracted by their psychological side, but this is not easy and one must be constantly on guard. In Fergal's defense, he did say that the number of configurations is "very, very high," which is putting it mildly, but is not openly dishonest like Searle's use of "scraps of paper", etc. in the Chinese Room. Returning to the chess example, if you were to approach the typical chess player and comment, "Ya know, I don't think Kasparov understands chess," you would likely get, "But he's the world chess champion," or "Hey, he beat Karpov, didn't he?" or something similar as a reply, not "He can explain why he lost the second game of that match, can't he?" or anything along those lines. So why has explaining why one won or lost been proposed (here and elsewhere) as a criterion for understanding chess? Perhaps it is the psychological impact of imagining a brain-damaged novice with a list (or, god forbid, a machine) understanding chess. "I know understanding chess is hard, and if he (it) is playing chess well, then playing chess well must not be what is meant by understanding chess. Let's see, what else could it mean to understand chess? ... " I seem to get this impression in Ken's article (message-id: <7cn102fg9ahA01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>) where playing chess is reduced to "being able to" do something, and understanding chess is redefined to be a level above(?) this. When the novice+list system started winning games that was no longer enough for understanding chess. And if we imagine the hint-machine I wrote about in an earlier article (yesterday), I suppose that explaining chess games will not seem like so much understanding after all. The hint-machine will only "be able to" give hints/explain games, it won't *understand chess*. I don't expect Ken to follow to this position, but I would ask him to consider how he got where he is. The same for Fergal. To look at a more real-world example, suppose one of these days I get up from my desk in the new EE/CSci building, walk out the front doors and across Washington Avenue to the Health Sciences complex, and spend some time carefully observing medical diagnosis taking place. I then ask some of the doctors how they go about making diagnoses. I might just find what many people who have actually done this sort of thing (in order to construct expert systems) have found: some experts actually *can't* tell you how they do what they do. Some, in fact, will make up partially false explanations in order to cover the fact that they cannot give adequate explanations! But if to understand medical diagnosis means to be able to give explanations of how such diagnoses are made, then these doctors don't understand medical diagnosis! For some reason, perhaps the psychological reason mentioned above, some people have twisted the meaning of the word 'understand' so far that we can now say with a straight face that a human expert acting as an expert within his own field of expertise doesn't understand his own field of expertise! Seems we have gone astray somewhere. Perhaps it is time to give serious consideration to whether, just perhaps, the novice+list *does* understand chess. >If intelligence were a "trick" or something that could be easily implemented, >AI researchers would have succeeded back in the '50s. The fact that nobody >has managed to create a machine capable of human intelligence, or one that can >defeat the World Champion at chess reliably, indicates that the problems are >quite difficult. > >David Thornley I agree that intelligence is no "trick" and that it cannot be easily implemented, but the fact that no one has succeeded yet with the full thing is hardly a proof of this. Getting a machine to play chess the way people do is probably quite hard, but brute-force may well get us a World Champion in the form of a machine with the simple addition of speed. The question is, "Would this champion understand chess?" I think the answer might just be yes. Dean Hougen -- "I'm on the outside now." - Oingo Boingo