> The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. The whole premise is a misdirection by having a human execute a Chinese-speaking program by hand, then asking if the human understands Chinese, completely ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human. That would be like asking if neurotransmitters understand Chinese instead of focusing on the brain as a whole.
I really don't understand why people have such a hard time with this argument. Seems like there's some unaddressed materialist/eliminativist prejudice underneath it all.
The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the symbols it is given (hence the whole idea of an effective method). (Actually, Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs. That is, there is not an objective fact of the matter that a computer is a computer and that it is computing. If you looked at it, there's nothing in what's going on that says "oh, yeah, this machine is adding numbers". Kripke also gets into this with his "quaddition" argument.)
When you understand Chinese, reading a symbol or legal string of symbols leads your mind to form conceptual content with some intentionality or signification. We can have other thoughts in response and this can lead to the production of signs with some other signification. The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element. And that's the point. Computers are highly systematized patterns of convention that permit the simulation of some of what we would typically expect of human beings or maybe some other animal, but strictly speaking, they don't even compute anything, much less understand.
Your neurons aren't doing anything except spiking in response to action potentials (among other physical processes). They're just producing outputs given some chain of inputs and have no semantic understanding either. Where does the understanding of Chinese (or English) come from then?
Also your assumption of the program not forming any conceptual content, will depend on what exactly the program is doing. The Chinese room says it's carrying out a conversation in a manner indistinguishable from a human, but that could mean anything from running a very fancy GPT-3 to running a whole-brain simulation of a Chinese person.
In either case, the human running the program is a distraction. You might as well ask if the pencil or the book he's using to compute the instructions understands Chinese. If the program was running on a CPU, it'd be the same thing - the CPU doesn't understand Chinese, the program does.
>The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the symbols it is given (hence the whole idea of an effective method).
But the symbols aren't the interesting piece of a sequence of computation, but rather the structure being instantiated. There is a map/territory ambiguity here. The symbols are just placeholders into an abstract structure that describes the dynamics of some system. When the structure is reified, i.e. made actual by being implemented in a system, then it is the structure that has causal efficacy in the world and it is that which we interact with. Dismissing the idea of an implemented program understanding Chinese because "the program doesn't understand the symbols" is confusing the map for the territory.
>Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs.
I totally disagree. If I have a program that inverts an arbitrary matrix, this is not a function I project onto the program. This function is intrinsic to the sequence of operations it carries out. An intelligent alien studying the operation of the program would be able to figure out its function given enough time and effort.
>The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element.
The CPU is performing syntactic translation, but the structure being implemented is an existing thing beyond CPU operations. And this is the misdirection in the Chinese room argument. To ask if the man understands Chinese is just to ask the wrong question.
I really don't understand why people have such a hard time with this argument. Seems like there's some unaddressed materialist/eliminativist prejudice underneath it all.
The program isn't doing anything because it's just a bunch of symbols. You need something to "animate" the program, but that something need not comprehend the symbols it is given (hence the whole idea of an effective method). (Actually, Searle goes further when he describes computation as observer relative, and I would extend this to programs. That is, there is not an objective fact of the matter that a computer is a computer and that it is computing. If you looked at it, there's nothing in what's going on that says "oh, yeah, this machine is adding numbers". Kripke also gets into this with his "quaddition" argument.)
When you understand Chinese, reading a symbol or legal string of symbols leads your mind to form conceptual content with some intentionality or signification. We can have other thoughts in response and this can lead to the production of signs with some other signification. The program lacks this semantic component and merely performs what amounts to a syntactic translation of the input signs into output signs. This process is entirely stripped of any semantic element. And that's the point. Computers are highly systematized patterns of convention that permit the simulation of some of what we would typically expect of human beings or maybe some other animal, but strictly speaking, they don't even compute anything, much less understand.