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Very interesting discussion.
September 18, 2007 by pathos, 2 years 9 weeks ago
Comment id: 24994
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coglanglab,
Your paragraph 6 strikes me as a crutial point. The Searle analogy with a human in the room and a book of rules of Chinese, is acting as a "computer", albeit a slow cpu, taking input, seeking rules from a book, parsing a database, giving an output. True, in this sense, the person does not know Chinese. However, what if the person takes the book (as we humans have a tendancy to do), learns the rules, and derives the basis from which they were developed, and then applies them and further builds on them? It would be a daunting task, but I would say if this was done comprehensively, the person would know Chinese. To me, it is an interesting point to ponder, where does the person step over the line from functioning as a "computer", into the realm of knowing. Can this point be defined, and can in be applied to computers/AI, with respect to speech/language?
My background is in medicine/biomedical sciences and not computers/AI obviously, so I hope my thoughts are relevant.
To Dr. Fred, Interestingly, my son and I have had another discussion on understanding the universe. We talked about AI, and what seems to be limitations on robots/computers ability to generate and analyze new theories on unification/understanding the universe. I am always brought back to the work of Jacob Bronowski, who saw that in all our mathematics, physics, science, there will always be a human element that is required, even if it is just to translate an observation or phenomena, let alone understand it's basis. It seems to me, that this human component, will present in computers/robots also, as long as we have a hand in building them and programming them. To get to a truly new way of thinking of the universe and anything else, there must be a generation of non-human computer/robot evolution, that happens with the robotic system alone, without any human intervention. It would then be possible to have non-human thought, idea generation, etc.,that may include new thought processes that we can't comprehend/concieve with our own limited senses and mind. And maybe that's what's needed to understand it all. I think I need your book.
Best regards,
Pathos
Fort Collins, CO