Flaw in Searle's Chinese Room Argument
Half-way reductionism. The argument is looking at arbitrary level of abstraction. If you're gonna reduce it, reduce it all the way down. So, computation is not just manipulation of symbols, computation is just interaction between electromagnetic fields, like everything else.
But, computation can give rise to virtual realities, and so while other physicalist theories meet their explanatory end at the bottom of reductionism, the theory of virtual consciousness stands at the door to a realm of increasing complexities and almost unlimited possibilities.
We are virtual, people, I’m telling you.
We are not only relatives with monkeys, we are also relatives with Pacman!!
But, computation can give rise to virtual realities, and so while other physicalist theories meet their explanatory end at the bottom of reductionism, the theory of virtual consciousness stands at the door to a realm of increasing complexities and almost unlimited possibilities.
We are virtual, people, I’m telling you.
We are not only relatives with monkeys, we are also relatives with Pacman!!
Comments (43)
What does that even mean? Computation does nothing but flip bits. If a conscious observer interprets the bit flipping as a cat video, that's the contribution of consciousness. By itself, all the computer does is flip bits. In fact to have virtual reality you have to write a program that inputs a string of bits; and lights up a display screen with frequencies amenable to the human eye, in patterns the human brain can interpret and the human mind can experience. Humans write the programs to create the virtual realities out of meaningless bit patterns.
Mere bit flipping by itself does none of that. It just flips bits according to rules. If this one's on turn that one off. Rule-based bit flipping.
Meh.
Othello for computers.
:wink:
I'm afraid I don't understand the remark.
Quoting jgill
Virtual reality is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world.
The virtual reality program I’m talking about was also created by humans, only unbeknown to them and against their will, by their own brains.
Atoms do nothing but follow simple laws of physics, and yet here we are.
With emergent properties there are different levels of abstraction. Each one tells its own story in its own context, so general description of interactions at one level of abstraction does not explain interactions or causations on other levels.
Imagine an actual and simulated ball and switch. When either the actual ball falls on the actual switch or the virtual ball falls on the virtual switch, an actual light-bulb turns on. We have to look at the abstraction level of effective causation, and here it is not about flipping bits, it’s about two virtual entities interacting.
Virtual ball and virtual switch. The difference between these two virtual entities and their actual counterparts is superficial, but virtual entities are not only material like actual ones, they are better, they are also "immaterial" like only virtual entities can be.
Uhh. Searle postulates computation is just symbol manipulation. I simply explain why that very first step is a flaw, it’s arbitrary. See more details in the post above.
Who or what is it that's having the experience?
I don't doubt that VR can be fully immersive, either now or in the near future. But who's having the experience? Descartes thought through this question in 1641. He said, What if everything I see and experience is nothing more than an illusion created for me by an evil daemon? Even in that case, there is still an "I" that is experiencing the illusion. Your analysis doesn't begin to touch the question of who or what the experiencer is.
Here is Descartes's direct quote. Note that he's anticipated your idea by almost 400 years.
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literary-critics/rene-descartes/quotes
A deceiver, be it 17th century daemon or 21st century VR program, can create many realistic sense impressions for you to experience. But you are always the one who experiences. You always exist separately of any illusion you might be experiencing.
And speaking of Descartes, he anticipates such arguments:
— Rene Descartes
Great quote. Descartes anticipated the Turing test. And with "... even if they did many things as well as or, possibly, better than anyone of us, they would infallibly fail in others," he's making the distinction between weak and strong AI. Single purpose versus general purpose intelligence. Smart guy that Descartes.
If the program could spontaneously, without any learning or explicit programming of any philosophical or sentience related data, arrive to some thought along the lines of “I think therefore I know I exist”, or question like “Is your red the same as my red?”
Basically, observing its own curiosity towards its own existence and functionality should be revealing above anything else I can think of.
He’s talking about simulation in the context of epistemological uncertainty. I’m talking about simulation in the context of ‘virtual entities’ to address “explanatory gap”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap
Virtual machine, a kind of program, called ego, self, or consciousness. The machine called subconsciousness hosts or emulates virtual machine called consciousness inside of itself, so for the consciousness it is practically existing in the simulation created by its “master-machine”, which can feed sensations, emotions, and cognition signals by direct transfer, by fake signal, by modulated signal, or it can invent whatever new context with signal-meaning pairs, like colors or sounds, and present it to the “slave-machine” as actual reality.
We are like machines.
I'm not saying we're toys, but we're petty life that progressively gets smarter, or dumber. A machine can age quickly, and has greater half-life.
I believe that natural machines exist.
A natural machine can calculate who's focusing on me in their thoughts - an example of it's type of math.
I think that "natural machines" collect data from the universe by using living things as a Turing Machine.
I don't see the point in making self conscious or intelligent machines. I think beyond aethetics, it's a waste of time.
It's probably more beneficent to make a good 'dumb-robot'. Such as one that expells fire and rolls really fast at a target it fixates on. It may become more effective than a human-like one weilding any weapon.
It’s impossible to even begin with it because you would first need to know what is "mind", "understanding" or "consciousness". And as I said, reduction of computation to “symbol manipulation” is arbitrary point of view, incomplete, flawed and misleading.
His conclusion is already shown to be false by the work done with AI. In any case, I haven’t made any arguments yet, they have almost nothing to do with what Descartes was musing about.
I'm no expert, but I worked at an AI startup for 3 months recently, organising their documentation. And Descartes' argument - made in 1630! - has direct bearing on the issues they're facing. I would try and explain it to you, but from past experience with you, any attempt will be met with 'but you don't understand English', so I'll pass.
Quoting Qwex
I believe in puff the magic dragon and anti-gravity.
You're entitled to that belief, however, I wouldn't say it applied to this thread.
Whatever flaws you might ever turn up, the point is Searle caught cognitive scientists confusing semantics with syntax. Signal-meaning pairs, as you put it, with signal-signal pairs. Understanding, with signal-processing. Intentionality, with script-reading, or program following.
If that's what you are doing too, as I expect, you are in the respectable company of nearly everybody. It's a catastrophically tempting confusion.
The semantic ability that humans alone (so far) excel in, and start delighting in in infancy, is kind of like a game of word-fetch. Understanding how words are tossed into the world and predicting where they have landed. When AI robots can interact with the world with enough facility to find a ball in a garden, they might be in the position to start learning to sniff out meanings.
You seem to be hoping to by-pass that evolution and achieve results merely by suggestive labelling of the modules of an obviously non-conscious computer system. So Searle's argument clearly hasn't alerted you to any important difference between semantics and syntax. And, unfortunately, it isn't guaranteed to have that effect.
I said Searle’s reduction of computation to “symbol manipulation” is arbitrary point of view, incomplete and misleading. It’s like arguing chemistry is just stupid atoms following laws of physics, so they can not possibly give rise to things like biology, language or consciousness. Where is the confusion?
Oh, so right there. Searle doesn't say that symbol manipulation can not possibly give rise to consciousness. Only that it needs to at least produce meaning within the system (have a proper semantics). And showing symbol manipulation isn't showing a semantics.
[edit:fixed]
That’s worse. Then Searle's argument makes a wrong presupposition that it is an adequate model of how understanding works. It’s like first postulating little gremlins make the world go around, just to deny it - but there are no little gremlins, so the world stands still.
What does? My post or Searle's argument?
Quoting Zelebg
What, the Chinese Room?
Quoting Zelebg
So - not the Chinese Room?
Can you be a bit clearer?
Searle's argument.
So you think that atoms do "give rise" to language and consciousness?
The problem with all your posts is that they contain many unstated premisses, which, going on the evidence of what you do actually say are quite contentious and problematical in themselves. It's as if you're having a conversation in your mind with an imaginary opponent, and then you post your side of the conversation on the forum. But nobody else here has been having that conversation with you, so we don't know what your argument is, or what you're opposing.
Your OP in this case was extremely sketchy, as if you assume, not only that everyone reading understands Searle's Chinese Room argument, but also must be able to see what your objections to it are. But in this case, even the second sentence in the OP appears to state something which I believe is contentious, so I will try and spell out exactly what.
There used to be a poster here who was expert in biosemiotics [sup] 1[/sup], and he posted a link to a very good article on this subject, The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis by Howard Pattee, which I will quote from here.
The article then goes on to discuss foundational issues in the philosophy of biology and the nature of living things, which are not relevant here. The point this passage makes, is that the 'symbolic or semantic' order is not continuous with, or explicable in terms of, the laws which describe physical entities. In other words, that you can't assume that life and mind can be understood through the perspective of the laws of physics and chemistry alone. There's something else at work which can't be explained in those terms.
But this actually undermines the kind materialism which I think you're trying to argue for. I mean, it's natural to assume nowadays that science has a basic grasp of how physical processes give rise to life and mind - but that is what I'm questioning here. I don't think that it's a clear-cut scientific matter at all, it's not as if science has the basic outline worked out and it's just a matter of filling in the gaps. There's something the matter with the basic assumption about the nature of life, mind, reality, and so on, and that something is 'materialism'.
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1. Biosemiosis is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, or production and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm ~ Wikipedia.
Yes. Why do you ask, what do you think?
So you say, can you show? Pick one issue, quote me, and actually point out what you think is the problem.
I did that already. Look at your OP again. It's like, oh, a comment made in a philosophy tutorial when you're discussing Searle as part of a conversation. It kind of makes sense, but it's like a stream of thought rather than an argument.
Quoting Zelebg
Read the passage I quoted and think about it. It relates to the topic of the OP.
Philosophy asks us to question the very things we generally take for granted. The things that 'everyone knows' are true, that we just take for granted as being obvious facts. Some of them might not turn out to be so obvious.
You haven't explained the explanatory gap, you've only waved your hands at it.
It doesn't relate to anything I said, and you did not answer the question:
Do you think that atoms do "give rise" to language and consciousness or not?
You are incoherent, you can not focus a single sentence to directly address anything specific I said. You misinterpret me and then respond to yourself as if you are talking to me. You ask questions for no particular reason that you yourself refuse to answer. You are a waste of time.
Take any theory of consciousness, all they can do in their search for the ”substance of qualia” is to reach the bottom of reductionism and then simply stop.
There is only one thing that is not exhausted by reductionism, it’s computation and almost unlimited possibilities of virtual reality.
The only explanation we know of, for the existence of things that can not actually exist, such as unicorns or qualia, is virtual existence.
What a great coincidence that the technology we mastered in the past forty years just happens to be the secret of consciousness. How lucky we are! What are the odds?
It doesn't offer a model of understanding, though. It uses a clear case of non-understanding (you processing symbols in a language you don't understand) to show that showing syntax isn't showing semantics.
So I don't see what your gremlins are. Semantics? You don't see meaning and understanding as required for consciousness? Ok...
Time and odds do not change the fact that the only explanation we know of, for the existence of things that can not actually exist, such as unicorns or qualia, is virtual existence.
If it doesn't work on some supposed model of understanding, then how can it prove anything about understanding? Or, if it uses a clear case of non-understanding, how is it supposed to prove anything about understanding?
Searle argument simply works on the wrong model of understanding which he obviously takes as being universally accepted, but that is a wrong assumption, which once might have been true though. But today it really should be clear he simply starts with the wrong model and then proves the wrong model is wrong, it’s a farce.
He might agree with that :wink:
Makes sense. So we are still suffering ghosts of the past mistakes. Which reminds me to tell you something I don’t expect anyone will believe, but it can be tested and I know it is true.
It has to do with evolution of simulation or “numerical modeling” from the time before there were any computers through the time when computers were slow, and how that matters now.
Many proofs in modern physics are based on experiments and calculations that are more than half a century old and were never repeated with modern equipment or using modern computers. Actually some experiments and simulations were repeated showing past mistakes and inaccuracies, but you will not find this information easily.
For example, failure to simulate or develop an atomic model with continuous trajectories led to quantum mechanics. Before computers they used some kind of precalculated tables, and that simply does not work with any system with more than two bodies, but it actually can be done with proper simulation, thus QM is superfluous to begin with.
The advance of the perihelion of Mercury,, also using precalculated tables considering only pairs of interacting bodies and not system as a whole, but implementation of general relativity with a proper numerical modeling of the whole system shows it falls apart, planets end up spiraling into the sun or reaching velocities greater than that of light, thus GR is just wrong.
Many modern computer games, physics software engines and scientific simulations use time integration algorithms developed with first computers that use various kinds of extrapolation techniques to optimise processing. However, as computer speed increased those tricks became redundant and even counterproductive, but people forgot how it all came to be and think the hacks are part of it all. So if you play some video game and see visual artifacts like screen tearing, stuttering or glitching, it does not have to be like that, it’s because of 50 years old algorithm with unnecessary and counterproductive optimisations, thus even very many very smart people can be very stupid.
I 2nd that motion. Moreover, OP saying "We are virtual, people, I’m telling you." is a meaningless statement, IMHO. b/c everything mental is virtual. so, obvious "I" and qualia is virtual, like our consciousness. virtual does not mean something is not real, at least to someone, somewhere...
There is no sure fire test. You can't ask me and I can't ask you any question that tests self-awareness. If you say you have it, then from my point of view it could be true, or it could be just a programmed response.
You do not test by questioning, but by being questioned. If a kid spontaneously one day asks “is my red the same as your red?”, I’d say that gives confirmation with significant confidence, if not certainty. Similarly, if a robot who was not explicitly thought of anything about such matters spontaneously develops curiosity about its qualia, then the best explanation is that it actually is a subject of phenomenal experience itself.