Akvod on 19 November 2009
| famousringo said: Has anybody heard of the "Chinese box" thought experiment? It does a pretty good job of illustrating the difference between a simulation and actual understanding. Imagine a man with absolutely no understanding of Chinese is isolated in a box. Messages written in Chinese are inserted through a slot in the box. The box is equipped with many, many manuals which tell the man in the box what Chinese characters should be written in response to a particular message, without describing what any of those symbols actually mean. The man simply sees the message, looks it up in a manual, copies the response written in the manual, and slips his reply out of the box. The result is a man who might appear to understand Chinese, but in fact doesn't have a clue what any of those symbols mean. He doesn't have the symbolic links to associate the Chinese word for 'dog' with a furry, amiable quadruped. Writing a program that can simulate the thought process of a cat is no different than writing a more complete Chinese phrasebook for the man in the box. They might be making better simulations, but they aren't teaching the computer to think. |
There are those who argue that's how the mind and what we essentially are O.o spooooky
