Does AI “understand,” or is understanding a uniquely biological phenomenon?
With the AI hype exploding, I re-read one of the most influential (and shortest!) philosophy papers of the 20th century: John Searle’s The Chinese Room (1980).
In it, Searle sets up a thought experiment: He is set inside a room where he has access to all the vocabulary and rules of Chinese language.
People feed him written questions in English (his native language), and Chinese, and he can answer both sets of questions perfectly.
From the outside, Searle seems like a native Chinese speaker, and a native English speaker.
But does he “understand” Chinese, like he understands English?
“[W]hat is suggested - though certainly not demonstrated by the example - is that the computer program is simply irrelevant to my understanding of the story. In the Chinese case I have everything that artificial intelligence can put into me by way of a program, and I understand nothing; in the English case I understand everything, and there is so far no reason at all to suppose that my understanding has anything to do with computer programs; that is, with computational operations on purely formally specified elements.“
Searle - and his contemporary at UC Berkeley, Hubert Dreyfus - disputed that computers or AI can ever be truly intelligent — in the same way humans can.
I had the honor to study under both — Dreyfus’s Heidegger lectures are still among the highlights of my life.
As Dreyfus used to repeat all the time, “Calculators don’t calculate. WE use calculators to calculate.”
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