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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese Room Experiment: empirical tests
Message-ID: <15813@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 27 Nov 90 16:42:16 GMT
References: <7852@uwm.edu> <15799@venera.isi.edu> <7888@uwm.edu>
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Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
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In article <7888@uwm.edu> markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes:
>
>But the question, having to do with the Chinese Room experiment, is whether
>you can actually converge onto an understanding of the language in this way
>WITHOUT ever 'cheating' by looking up translation references.

Having gone on at some length about the general issue of learning, I would only
like to make a few minor comments about Mark's other article.  First of all, I
STILL think it is important that those of us who are really interested in
BUILDING systems steer clear of words like "understanding."  As I have pointed
out in reviewing Turing's original paper, Turing was well aware of this danger
and knew how to think like an engineer when the situation demanded.  This
bulletin board may be devoted to questions of philosophy, but that does not
mean we should fall into all the traps inherent in philosophical digressions.

The second point is that, even if we substitute some more mundane goal for
"understanding"--such as some variation on Turing's "imitation game" which
would provide a demonstration of learning-by-apprenticeship--we should not
assume that we can attain any sort of "convergence" on that goal.  We are
not interested in systems that converge;  rather, we should attend to systems
that manage in the world.  Systems that converge tend to lack the flexibility
which such management demands.

Having said all that, I want to raise one final point on this issue of
"cheating."  The fact is that what Mark calls "cheating" is part of what
we accept as intelligent behavior among humans.  After all, human memory
is not so perfect that we never have to use a dictionary.  (Indeed, we probably
can all mention entries which we have consulted not just once but multiple
times.)  Indeed, what makes the GEDANKENEXPERIMENT interesting is that there
is some point in the accumulation of experience after which such reference
materials become USEFUL--rather than some obscure resource of symbols.
Learning-by-apprenticeship is as much a matter of learning to use reference
materials as it is learning to work with "primary objects."
>
>Of course, if you really want to try this on a task where there's no
>opportunity for cheating, you'd get a hold of all the Mayan Hieroglyphic
>sources and copy them all by tracing.  I almost did that a few years ago... :)


My conjecture is that you would certainly get as far as forming perceptual
categories.  You might even get a bit farther.  However, you would never get
to a point of associating what you were transcribing with any observations of
the real world.  That would severely inhibit your ability to "learn" very much.

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