Chinese Room Step 1: Drop the Homunculus
http://offsecnewbie.com/2018/08/23/oscp-journey-part-10/?replytocom=268 March 11, 2015
Anyone interested in AI or philosophy of mind must wrestle with John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment. Some people say this argument proves that artificial intelligence is simply impossible. I don’t think so, but the Chinese Room is indeed very useful to analyze and discuss. Searle makes some good points that a lot of AI fans seem to have missed.
Well, all I want to do today is just point out that “Searle in the room” looks like a homunculus. And that’s a fallacy, right? So we need to get rid of that homunculus somehow, or else the Chinese Room isn’t really a good model of a real brain.
See, the Chinese Room thought experiment has several key components:
1) The man in the room
2) The instruction book
3) The room itself, with its walls and input-output slot
4) Real Chinese people outside the room
And you can think about the flow of information through the room. First the real Chinese people put a slip of paper into the input slot. “Searle in the room” takes the paper and his instruction book and figures out what he’ll do. Finally he writes something and puts his own slip of paper through the output slot.
But we don’t need Searle in the room at all! We can get rid of that homunculus. Here’s how:
Imagine instead of a slip of paper, the Chinese input is in the form of electronic pulses along a wire. Let’s say too that the instruction book isn’t made of paper but is instead an integrated circuit microchip. The “rules” of Chinese are built into this microchip in the form of myriad logic gates, just like in any modern computer. So the input message can flow electronically straight into the microchip, and the output can come straight out of the microchip too. No need for a “little man” in the room at all.
I’m not saying this solves the whole puzzle of the Chinese Room, but I think this should be step No. 1 in anyone’s analysis of the thought experiment. First get rid of the homunculus. Only then can you clear away that first bit of confusion and proceed to the next step.
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