Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!mks!tj
From: tj@mks.UUCP (T. J. Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: re: Searle's Chinese Room
Keywords: Searle
Message-ID: <696@mks.UUCP>
Date: 13 Mar 89 05:46:42 GMT
Organization: Mortice Kern Systems, Waterloo, Ont.
Lines: 117

It is evident from the length and heat of the debate over Searle's
Chinese Room thought experiment that the two major positions on it
(pro: the experiment ``proves'' that a program cannot ``understand'';
anti: the system Searle+rules does ``understand'') are based on
very different premises. I think this is because there are two major
flaws in the design of the experiment, which deflect attention from
the interesting implications. The two flaws are that Searle is in the
room, and that the discourse with the room is in Chinese.

I intend to show that these features of the thought experiment appeal
to dangerously misleading intuitions about the situation; and that an
experiment in which these features are corrected reveals that any
system intending to show human-like ``understanding'' must closely
approximate human real-world experience.

I call the presence of Searle in the room a flaw in experimental
design because, as has been noted by a number of other commentators, a
real human being fails to approach the speed and memory capacity
required to ``run'' the Chinese program, by a factor of at least a
million (very conservative estimate). This is vitally important, not a
mere detail of implementation. Certainly no-one would suggest that the
Chinese Room contained a native speaker if it took weeks to begin an
utterance, and months to complete it. Conversely, if Searle did have
the speed and capacity to memorize and run the program, we would
hardly consider him human; and he would certainly have great
difficulty conversing with us ordinary mortals, who take months (of
his time) to say ``Do you understand Chinese?'' Rather than banish
Searle completely, i will replace him with a daemon of adequate
performance, and show that his understanding (of human language) is
irrelevant to the performance of the program.

The detail that the program understands Chinese is more subtle, in
leading experimenters not to inspect too deeply the content of the
messages issuing from the room. It is enough (almost) that the
mysterious squiggles turn out to be intelligible at all! But what if
the program the Searle-daemon is running ``understands'' English?
Would one have to conclude that the ``understanding'' resided in the
daemon? Let us imagine a fragment of conversation...

Experimenter:	Tell me, what do you think of Shakespeare?
Searle-daemon:	Well, he is certainly the most widely read and
(to himself)	quoted writer in the English language...
(runs the program at daemon speed)
Room:           Oh, boring, boring, boring!
		We had to study a bunch of that stuff in school,
		y'know, and it's like, totally weird, y'know.
Searle-daemon:	Hey, wait a minute! I would never say anything even
		remotely like that!

Remember, this program is to convince a sceptical experimenter that it
is a native human speaker. It will certainly have to demonstrate a
consistent style and idiom, and espouse individual ideas and opinions.
It would hardly be surprising if this ``individual'' were very
different from Searle. (Indeed if the ``individual'' was in any way
recognizable as Searle we would suspect that the daemon was taking
short-cuts, and substituting his own responses instead of running the
program.)

Here we approach the heart of the matter, from which perspective we
can see the premises on which the opposing sides are camped. If the
program has no connection with the rest of the world except for the
slips of paper passing under the door (which is certainly implicit in
Searle's formulation of the experiment), then the intuition that it
cannot embody ``understanding'' is certainly well founded. No
sceptical enquirer is likely to be fooled for long by a correspondent
lacking a rich experiential background, a sense of humour, particular
tastes in art and music, opinions on the weather, politics, Searle,
and so on.

Searle grants in his premises that the program appears to be a native
speaker (of Chinese, now modified to English). If you take that
premise seriously (the ``anti'' position) then you have to provide
that the program normally has far richer connections to the rest of
the world than slips of paper under the door. After all, it has to
engage in convincing dialogues following from questions like ``What do
you think of Shakespeare?'', and ``Why are you in that room?'', and
``What do you do when you are not conversing by slips of paper?''. If,
on the other hand, you assume the absence of these connections (the
``pro'' position), then the program is revealed for a straw man, for
it certainly could not demonstrate the richness of experience
characteristic of a normal adult human, and would quickly fail the
Turing test.

(One might suppose that a complete human background is somehow built
in to the program. Disregarding how this background might be acquired,
other than by actual experience, it must somehow be kept up to date.
For this updating to be effective, it must provide the rich
connections posited above. On the other hand the program could avoid
the updating problem by claiming to be recently afflicted with total
deafness, blindness, and paralysis. It is an interesting but different
question how likely anyone would be to accept the ``humanity'' of such
a program.)

To interpret the strong AI position as claiming that a program can
provide convincing human performance (of discourse or conversation)
while being connected to the world only via the discourse channel, is
to set up an easily demolished straw man. This is the program
characterized as performing ``mere symbol-crunching''. No-one (that i
have read) is claiming that such a program could pass the (linguistic)
Turing test. In fact, as my remarks above intend to illustrate, there
is no real difference between the ``linguistic'' and ``total'' Turing
tests: given a careful and sceptical enquirer, a program must
demonstrate an embedding in the experiential world as rich as that of
any normal adult human in order to pass the linguistic test.

It should be apparent by now that i accept that an artificial
intelligence can in principle exist, embodying a genuine understanding
gained through interacting with the world. However, i confidently
claim that nothing in existence today comes anywhere close to that
performance, or even suggests how it might be achieved. To claim
``understanding'' on behalf of any current AI program is to grossly
abuse the term.
-- 
     ||  // // ,'/~~\'   T. J. Thompson              uunet!watmath!mks!tj
    /||/// //|' `\\\     Mortice Kern Systems Inc.         (519) 884-2251
   / | //_// ||\___/     35 King St. N., Waterloo, Ont., Can. N2J 2W9
O_/                                long time(); /* know C */