The Chinese Room

chineseroom

 
I wanted to post one of my favorites theories based on an impressive premise: that artificial intelligence is the fastest processing but is not intelligent. Jeff Hawking in his book On Intelligence developed a powerful theory about how the human brain works and explained why computers are not intelligent.

 

Artificial Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

 
John Searle, an influential philosophy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was at the time saying that computers were not, and could not be, intelligent. To prove it, in 1980 he came up with a thought experiment called the Chinese Room. It goes like this:
 
Suppose you have a room with a slot in one wall, and inside is an English-speaking person sitting at a desk. He has a big book of instructions and all the pencils and scratch paper he could ever need. Flipping through the book, he sees that the instructions, written in English, dictate ways to manipulate, sort, and compare Chinese characteres. Mind you, the directions say nothing about the meanings of the Chinese characters; they only deal with how the characters are to be copied, erased, reordered, transcribed, and so forth.

Someone outside the toom slips a piece of paper through the slot. On it is written a story and questions about the story, all in Chinese. The man inside doesn't speak or read a word of Chinese, but he picks up the paper and goes to work with the rulebook. He toils and toils, rotely following the instuctions in the book.
 
At times the instructions tell him to write characters on scrap paper, and at other times to move and erase characters, the man works until the book's instructions tell him he is done. When he is finished at last he has written a new page of characters, which unbeknownst to him are the answers to the questions. The book tells him to pass his paperback through the slot. He does it and wonders what this whole tedious exercise has been about. Outside, a Chinese speaker reads the page. The answers are all correct, she notes-even insightful. If she is asked whether those answers came from an intelligent mind that had understood the story, she will definitely say yes. But can she be right? Who understood the story?
 
Searly's answer is that no understanding did occur; it was just a bunch of mindless page flipping and pencil scratching. And now the bait-and-switch: the Chinese Room is exactly analogous to a digital computer. Thus no matter how cleverly a computer is designed to simulate intelligence by producing the same behavior as a human, it has no understanding and it is not intelligent. (Searle made it clear he didn't know what intelligence is; he was only saying that whatever it is, computers don't have it.)
 
A human doesn't need to do anything to understand a story. I can read a story quitely, and although I have no overt behavior my understanding and comprehension are clear, at least to me. You, on the other hand, cannot tell from my quiet behavior whether I understand the story or not, or even if I know the language the story is written in. You might later ask me questions to see if I did, but my understanding occurred when I read the story, not just when I answer your questions. A thesis of this book is that understanding cannot be measured by external behavior, it is instead an internal metric of how the brain remembers things and uses its memories to make predictions.

(Hawkins, 2004.)

 

REFERENCES:
  • Hawkins, J. with Blakeslee, S. (2004). On Intelligence. St. Martin's Griffin, New York.
  • Post picture from Lenin Estrada. Retreived from https://www.pexels.com/
FURTHER READING:

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