[HN Gopher] Why philosophers should care about computational com...
___________________________________________________________________
Why philosophers should care about computational complexity (2011)
Author : lordleft
Score : 101 points
Date : 2021-11-16 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| dang wrote:
| Past threads:
|
| _Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
| (2011) [pdf]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17573142 -
| July 2018 (22 comments)
|
| _Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
| (2011) [pdf]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913825 -
| June 2016 (54 comments)
|
| _Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
| [pdf]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061744 - Feb 2015
| (43 comments)
|
| _Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2897277 - Aug 2011 (10
| comments)
|
| _Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2861825 - Aug 2011 (36
| comments)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Question: "How many computable numbers could a computer compute
| if a computer could compute all computable numbers?"
|
| Woodchucks are curious about this.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| You owe the oracle 32GB of RAM. His game rig is low on memory
| and hungry.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I wanted to incorporate this question with an Arduino lesson
| plan based around key breaking, basically demonstrating that
| 10,000 combinations might seem like a lot when you're doing it
| by hand, but a computer can brute force it in no time, so how
| big does a number have to be before it starts taking serious
| time for a computer to count to it?
|
| That's when I learned compilers will look at your for loops and
| just predict the result of incrementing a number a million
| times and skip to the end condition. Was quite a shock to find
| out the program I write is not the program that runs. I think I
| added something simple to the loop, like flipping a bit on a
| digital output to force the loop to actually run.
| kamray23 wrote:
| -O0 turns off optimizations on most reasonable C compilers.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Stick random() in there somewhere for each iteration, print
| it out? Then the optimizer won't be able to just jump to the
| end.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Actually yes I think that was what we went with, instead of
| counting from 0 to MAX_INTEGER we generated random numbers
| that many times, brute forced integer "keys" just fine.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is only redeeming to me really because generally its the
| philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields
| what they should do or think. Nice to see the tables turned on
| them!
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Goodness yes. When I was in physics, there were a lot of these
| philosophers who had some kind of real _problem_ with (special)
| relativity, like it had swerved and driven over their dog on
| purpose. I 'm not talking about the spackling of idiots who
| were under the impression that Michelson-Morley was performed
| precisely once, but folks who just found it antithetical to
| their personal outlooks, aside from the space opera types whose
| dreams are cruelly crushed underfoot by _c_ (no exotic matter
| has yet called Lazarus forth from his tomb). Normally, one
| could dispel them with some holy water and a copy of Dr. Will
| 's _Was Einstein Right?_ but some had a tenacity to them which
| had long transformed from a virtue to a vice.
| [deleted]
| ChrisSD wrote:
| It's funny because of the number of physicists who loudly
| proclaim philosophy is either dead or at least useless (while
| also extolling the virtues of their own philosophy of
| science, with bonus points for mangling Popper).
| quantum_mcts wrote:
| Also physicist. My beef is more with philosophy-of-science
| folks in particular. They think that we, physicists, really
| need them and their insights about how to do physics
| properly. For example they really like this meme:
|
| reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/gjz24v
|
| Which is totally dishonest. (I tried to counter that with
| this https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ , but that's not memey
| enough.)
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| It's not a coincidence that the left side (more positive to
| philosophy) and Born (whose quotes are more neutral) are
| also continental European, while the three critical
| examples (can add in Krauss, Hawking, and many others) come
| from Anglo-Americans. There's too often a pettiness in the
| latter (to an extent, also in your post) in which what look
| like fairly limited and contemporaneous gripes about
| academics in another field is given the trappings of some
| historically unbound and universal insight.
|
| There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy;
| even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical
| position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the
| philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of
| e.g. Poincare, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von
| Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists
| contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler
| and Paul Anderson.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| That's not my experience at all, rather I see a lot of
| philosophers giving _good_ pointers where their field borders
| on others, and then being shot down or ignored. I 'd actually
| be interested in an example of this, as I don't think I've
| encountered it so far, although I'm admittedly not that engaged
| either.
|
| By far the worst offenders of presumptuousness must be old
| physicists though, followed by old computer scientists.
| Thinking of Michio Kaku talk about philosophy still makes me
| physically cringe.
| btilly wrote:
| Can you provide examples of your "good pointers"?
|
| My experience is that the feedback provided by philosophers
| sounds good to the philosophers, but is actually useless to
| practitioners. And in technical subjects, like math, computer
| science and physics, it is important to develop a really good
| BS filter.
|
| That said, I am also sympathetic to
| http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, so must admit some
| hostility to the current practice of philosophy.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I think there's an inherent tension between what
| philosophers are trying to do and what practitioners in
| specific fields are trying to do that leads to the bad
| blood.
|
| If you're a philosopher, you're generally trying to look at
| things from a general enough perspective that you might
| argue for a radical shift in the way we do things and call
| out the assumptions that are otherwise taken as axioms of
| the field--the water we swim around in.
|
| If you're a practitioner, you're focused on swimming. Core
| axioms and prevailing theory are your presuppositions--
| you're just focused on getting things done within the
| confines of the prevailing theory/framework, perhaps
| nudging it every so often in particular directions based on
| new discoveries--its quite rare that a working scientist
| sparks an actual theoretic revision and becomes the next
| Einstein (see thomas Kuhn).
|
| So yes, philosophers are totally useless when it comes to
| getting practical stuff done because that's generally not
| the space they are attempting to help with or illuminate.
| iworshipfaangs2 wrote:
| > generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough
| to tell other fields what they should do or think
|
| I'm sorry but in my experience, this is not at all a one-way
| street. It is very common for me to hear engineers and other
| STEM-types to complain about modern art or about the supposedly
| obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the
| liberal arts. However, these complaints rarely come from
| Engineers who take an active interest in the fields they
| criticize.
|
| Admittedly I'm mainly speaking about general people I work with
| or whom I (sadly often) encounter on the internet. But there
| are some eminent names who are just as guilty. In addition to
| Kaku, as bakuninsbart mentioned, I could also bring up, off the
| top of my head, Stephen "philosophy is dead" Hawking and
| Richard "Shakespeare would have been better if he were
| educated" Dawkins.
|
| I think I could come up with many more examples if I started
| looking. On the other hand, we fortunately also have people
| like Murray Gell-Man, who has gotten us to quote from the most
| experimental book in all of English-language literature every
| time we talk about elementary sub-atomic particles.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Based upon minimal, but seemingly enough observation, I'd add
| Kraus to the list of philistines.
| normac2 wrote:
| > supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various
| disciplines of the liberal arts.
|
| Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this?
| Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there
| nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's
| obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and
| I just cherry-picked a bad one?
|
| I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some
| people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work
| with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the
| writing style.
|
| It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me
| wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous
| systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling
| prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that
| if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind,
| it would no longer seem obscure.
|
| [1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/
| voidhorse wrote:
| While one could argue that the abstract you linked is not
| well written, I do not think it's obscurantist by any
| means. It's a dissertation, so it's not surprising they are
| using the jargon of the field and citing important works.
|
| All academic literature is specialist literature. If you
| aren't trained in the field you likely won't understand it.
| It's totally reasonable to me that a STEM person would have
| no idea what this abstract is saying just as a Humanities
| person probably couldn't make heads or tails of the
| abstract of a dissertation on category theory or on a
| particular branch of computer science.
|
| I find it funny that STEM folks always go after humanities
| academics for being obtuse when its just a matter of the
| pot calling the kettle black--dense STEM research and
| theory uses language that'd be considered equally obtuse to
| the untrained reader.
| normac2 wrote:
| To me, it goes beyond being hard to read, and I take it
| as obscurantist in the strictest sense of someone going
| out of their way to be hard to understand.
|
| I have a theory that most STEM people simply don't think
| like most humanities people, literally at a neurological
| level. (I edited my post to add some thoughts around
| that, possibly after you replied.)
|
| STEM work rarely comes off that way to me. The only time
| it looks to me like the person is going out of their way
| to be obtuse and technical, is some higher math stuff
| (which is a known thing and acknowledged even by some
| mathematicians). This includes the stuff from entirely
| different parts of STEM that I don't understand at all.
| voidhorse wrote:
| That's fair. I would agree there is a certain "big words
| == more intellectual == smarter" or "more difficult ==
| smarter" fallacy that arises somewhat frequently in
| contemporary humanities papers.
|
| I think part of it might originate from the fact that the
| abstractions used for taking about things in the
| humanities aren't fixed as well as they are in science.
| Take the abstract in question for example--the writer
| uses the palimpsest as a sort of visual analogue and
| abstraction to try to describe interactions and
| relationships between texts/narratives--while it's not an
| absurd metaphor, it's difficult to grok, because there is
| no real standardized metaphor for describing this set of
| relationships. You could argue the object of study isn't
| as well defined as it is in the sciences where we have
| fairly standardized abstractions like "waveform" etc.
| that make it a lost easier to talk about things clearly.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The Chinese Room has been on my mind lately after recently
| learning about it:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
|
| Highly recommend trying to grasp the argument, because in a sense
| it connects complexity to 'time to compute'. If it takes a room
| of robots following simple instructions a billion years to act as
| an AI that reads Chinese, are those robots a collective
| intelligence? Can it be scaled up to consciousness?
| skulk wrote:
| Why stop at a computer, why not extend the argument to a full
| simulation of a human brain? What if I sat in my room for 3
| million years simulating 3 seconds of a human body including
| the brain? Assuming that my simulation is faithful, who's to
| say that my simulation doesn't have some form of consciousness
| or subjective experience?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| You can go even deeper: given that your simulation follows a
| set of known rules from an initial state, what does actually
| performing those steps even matter?
|
| Is the consciousness given existence because you perform
| calculations on paper, or does it exist already within the
| fabric of reality and you're merely exposing it?
| 3np wrote:
| I think a common mistake is to conflate "consciousness"
| with "intelligence" or at least "thought".
|
| Just because we don't tend to recognize one without the
| other doesn't mean they necessarily have a causative
| relationship.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean. Just listing the steps of an
| algorithm is quite different than executing the steps of an
| algorithm. As an obvious example, with an algorithm for
| summing two numbers together, the difference between
| listing the steps and executing them is that when you
| execute them you are provided with the sum.
|
| I don't see any sense in which these _aren 't_ different,
| unless perhaps you're introducing some separate
| cosmological "Boltzmann brain"-style argument that all
| possible finite results of all halting algorithms will
| arise or have arisen due to random fluctuations. But in
| that case you've got a whole new set of assumptions to
| address.
| skulk wrote:
| The idea of a fundamental difference between the result
| of "performed" and "un-performed" computation always
| leads me to imagining the null universe, where nothing
| gets computed ever but all math "exists" as we'd expect.
| It begs the question, why is the universe non-null?
| Allowing the mere existence of the possibility of
| computation to answer that question is very comforting.
| But yes, it requires approximately as much faith as any
| monotheistic religion.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This is why I find it so strange that philosophers seem to by
| in large accept "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think therefor I am"
| as a valid proof of ontology. What if the appearance of
| thought is not actually thought?
|
| Did philosophers not watch Blade runner? Sure Descartes
| didn't - but contemporaries sure as shit do!
| jean_tta wrote:
| This is essentially the philosophical zombie thought
| experiment:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
| cuspycode wrote:
| But how do you even distinguish appearance of thought from
| actual thought, objectively? Of course you can always argue
| that actual thought is something that is subjectively
| experienced, but that leads to solipsism, doesn't it?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Solipsism is what you get from accepting the Cogito "I
| know I exist for sure, and only my own existence can be
| verified by the cogito"
|
| To answer your question, I claim that you can't. Radical
| skepticism ("we live in the universe of the evil demon"),
| which is what I advocate for, means that you can't even
| claim that you exist. See the works of Max Stirner for
| further elaboration of the implications of this for
| Philosophy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Not to downplay Descartes (his philosophy, specifically the
| process he undertakes, is worth a study), but something
| that the pop summaries of his writing really gloss over is
| that his entire premise hinges on something he takes as
| assumed true that need not be, and if it isn't, the rest
| goes straight off the rails.
|
| Paraphrasing from memory: he pins "cogito ergo sum" on the
| assumption that objective knowledge is possible. That
| assumption is built atop imagining an alternative: an evil
| demon has full control over his senses and feeds him
| whatever it wants to (essentially, the 'Matrix
| hypothesis'). His solution to this concern? "A loving God
| wouldn't create a universe that banal and meaningless."
|
| It's only a proof if you accept the postulate that
| objective reality is correlated with experience.
| [deleted]
| karpierz wrote:
| Where does computational complexity factor into the Chinese
| room?
|
| Whether the Chinese room responds quickly or slowly doesn't
| really factor into whether the room understands Chinese.
| Strilanc wrote:
| The linked article discusses this.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| > To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes
| appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be
| convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking
| human being.
|
| This is a fallacy, regardless of the language. Some comms
| between conscious entities must always contain metaphoric
| language, including signaling through body language. A shrug is
| a metaphor for uncertainty. This is why the premise of the
| Chinese Room is true (we can't build a mind in a box) but also
| why conscious machines will necessarily have to have bodies.
|
| Anything that is conscious and can hold a (real) dialog with a
| human will have emotional output tied to the body and it's
| collective experience.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Why couldn't you simulate the body too?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Some comms between conscious entities must always contain
| metaphoric language, including signaling through body
| language.
|
| What do you mean? Humans can certainly communicate and
| maintain meaningful relationships solely through writing.
| achr2 wrote:
| It seems to me that the argument is kind of silly. The "Chinese
| Room" has failed to account for the actual processes of the
| system. The 'spoken response' is only a small part of the
| 'program' of a mind; the rest is the internal processes that
| constitute consciousness that can infer, compare, reinforce,
| and associate. Consciousness is the whole of the system, not a
| functional IO.
| new_guy wrote:
| It's basically a red-herring (fallacious argument), the
| robots/workers etc are just homunculus, and the entire thing
| falls apart without them.
| arketyp wrote:
| Yeah, this is related to Stephen Wolfram's principle of
| computational equivalence and his re-take on "the weather has a
| mind of his own". Turing machines occur everywhere in nature,
| emerge from the simplest rules, Wolfram demonstrates, so maybe
| consciousness is everywhere too. Where to put the scope of
| computing processes basically. Searle refutes it saying it's
| nonsensical to contend that a concrete wall could be conscious.
| I don't know, who knows.
| np- wrote:
| It doesn't seem particularly nonsensical to contend a
| concrete wall has some form of consciousness. Concrete walls
| don't spring up out of nowhere, they're built by humans who
| have a need to separate things (either for good or for bad).
| A single concrete wall might not seem like much, but in the
| greater scope of things, the rising and falling of all
| concrete walls seems to represent some sort of plane of
| humanity and its consciousness. Even think of the extremely
| complicated emotions evoked by different types of walls: i.e.
| the Berlin Wall, the U.S.-Mexico Wall, the Great Wall, etc. I
| know I'm probably reading way too much into this specific
| example, but I think this could generally apply to a lot of
| things.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Highly recommend trying to grasp the argument
|
| It's not really, IMO, all that valuable.
|
| > because in a sense it connects complexity to 'time to
| compute'.
|
| No, it doesn't. It basically just rejects _by definition_ (and
| then presents an illustration which is a useful support if you
| accept its definition or an illustration that its definitions
| are wrong if you don't) that a programmed response system that
| exhibits the behavior of an actor that understands material
| actually understands material, and from that rejects the idea
| that brains (which produce minds, which have actual
| understanding) are equivalent to programmed response systems.
| [deleted]
| Yajirobe wrote:
| > If it takes a room of robots following simple instructions a
| billion years to act as an AI that reads Chinese, are those
| robots a collective intelligence? Can it be scaled up to
| consciousness?
|
| No, because of the article you linked to. Chinese room argues
| AGAINST the existence of consciousness/intelligence arising
| from following symbolic instructions.
|
| Here is a quote I like by John Searle:
|
| > Computational models of consciousness are not sufficient by
| themselves for consciousness. The computational model for
| consciousness stands to consciousness in the same way the
| computational model of anything stands to the domain being
| modelled. Nobody supposes that the computational model of
| rainstorms in London will leave us all wet. But they make the
| mistake of supposing that the computational model of
| consciousness is somehow conscious. It is the same mistake in
| both cases.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Searle's argument misses the mark. A simulated rainstorm wont
| leave us wet, but a simulation of a disordered state is (or
| contains) a disordered state. If consciousness is a
| relational property of a system, then a simulation of such a
| relational property will instantiate that relational property
| without qualification. The Chinese room argument can't
| address this conception of consciousness.
| mjburgess wrote:
| The argument is against this view of consciousness.
|
| More intuitively: our words are things which do things in
| the world. When we acquire them we do so by being embedded
| in the world. When we use them we use them to change the
| world. (Largely).
|
| If a child in a cupboard reading a textbook out-loud could
| fool a chemist that the child understood chemistry, it
| doesn't mean they do. In the end, you need to turn on that
| bunsen burner.
|
| The chinese room needs to be taken super-literally: does
| the person just doing a "hash-table lookup" on "the right
| answers to pre-prosed questions" _actually understand_.
|
| To me its incredibly obvious that they do not. This does
| not establish that, eg. cognition, does not involve
| computational hastable-like processes. I think it does
| establish that propontents of a naive computationalism have
| an incredibly big challenge.
|
| The challenge is to specify the environment
| computationally, since that is the only means by which the
| computer itself can be sufficiently embedded and actually
| _understand_ anything.
|
| The issue here is that if "computer" isnt just a trivial
| property it has to include, eg., measurability,
| determinism, etc. Properties that reality lacks. Reality
| isnt a computer.
|
| Starting with the chinese room one /can/ supplement
| sufficiently until we reach searle's conclusion.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| > does the person just doing a "hash-table lookup"
|
| But this is Searle's sleight-of-hand. The question isn't
| whether the person in the Chinese room understands
| Chinese, but whether the system as a whole understands
| Chinese. The man is analogous to the CPU in a computer,
| but the CPU is embedded in a larger system and it is the
| entire system that performs operations of the computer.
| You can't focus on one component to the exclusion of the
| rest of the system and expect to derive valid conclusions
| about the system.
|
| >The challenge is to specify the environment
| computationally
|
| I agree, but this presents no _in principle_ challenge to
| a computational system reaching such a detailed
| description of the environment.
|
| >The issue here is that if "computer" isnt just a trivial
| property it has to include, eg., measurability,
| determinism, etc. Properties that reality lacks. Reality
| isnt a computer.
|
| I don't follow. The issues of measurability and
| determinism in QM (assuming that's what you are referring
| to) aren't necessarily problems at the scale of physical
| systems. Computational systems can certainly make
| distinctions to within some margin of error, which is
| sufficient as a substrate for gathering information about
| the external environment.
| mjburgess wrote:
| No, there's no sleight of hand. It seems you just agree
| that the man doesnt understand Chinese.
|
| > at the scale of physical systems.
|
| Alas, they are. Even classical mechanics isn't
| deterministic. Most systems are chaotic and require
| infinite precision in measurement to be deterministic.
| Since QM precludes this, most chaotic systems literally
| can only be predicted over short horizons.
|
| Eg., there is moon in our solar system, i believe, with a
| chaotic orbit. At maximum possible measurement fidelity
| we can predict 20yrs.
|
| Consider that all the particles of our body are just
| these little chaotic moons, and their aggregate chaos
| dramatically dimishes this 20yr horizon.
|
| There is, quite literally, not enough information present
| in this moment to predict the next moment. Most systems
| are sufficiently chaotic in a sufficiently large number
| of parameters to preclude this. This reaches all the way
| up to classical scales.
|
| Reality isnt a computer.
| burkaman wrote:
| Everyone agrees that the man doesn't understand Chinese.
| The sleight of hand is that Searle compares a full
| computer to a component of the Chinese Room, when he
| should be comparing a computer to the room as a whole.
| The man in this thought experiment is analogous to an
| internal component of a computer, not the whole thing.
|
| Put another way, Searle separates a "computer" from the
| instructions it is running, but there is no such
| separation. It's like separating a brain from the
| electrical brain activity. It's true that a brain without
| electrical activity cannot understand Chinese just like a
| computer without a program cannot, but that's not a very
| interesting observation.
| mjburgess wrote:
| A computer is just an implementation of a function (in
| mathematical sense), ie., a finite set of pairs (IN, OUT)
| where (IN, OUT) in {0,1}^N, {0,1}^N. Ie., its an
| implementation of {010101, ...} -> {010101010, 01010...}
| .
|
| If we all agree that the function the man performs can be
| set to be whatever you wish (ie., any {input sentences}
| -> {output sentences}) and we agree that the man doesnt
| understand chinese... then the question arises: what is
| missing?
|
| I dont think the "systems reply" actually deals with this
| point -- it rather just "assumes it does" by "assuming
| some system" to be specified.
|
| If using a language isnt equivalent to a finite
| computable function -- what is it?
|
| The systems reply needs to include that the _reason_ a
| reply is given is that the system is _caused_ to give the
| reply by the relevant causal history / environment /
| experiences. Ie., that the system says "it's sunny"
| _because_ it has been acquainted with the sun, and it
| observes that the day is sunny.
|
| This shows the "systems reply" prima facie fails: it is
| no reply at all to "presume that the system can be so-
| implemented so as to make the systems reply correct". You
| actually need to show it can be so-implemented. No one
| has done this.
|
| There are lots of reasons to suppose it can be done, not
| least, that most things arent computable (ie., via non-
| determinism, chaos, and the like). Given the environment
| is chaotic, it is a profoundly open question whether
| _computers_ can be built to "respond to the right
| causes" and computational systems may be incapable of
| doing this.
|
| If they cannot, then searle is right. That man, and
| whatever he may be a part of, will never understand
| chinese. It is insufficient to "look up the answers",
| "proper causation" is required.
| burkaman wrote:
| What is missing is the man's ability to memorize the
| function and carry it out without the book. If he could,
| and the function truly produced a normal response to any
| Chinese phrase in existence, then he would speak Chinese.
|
| Edit: He would speak Chinese, but he wouldn't understand
| it. What is missing in order to understand Chinese is an
| additional program that translates Chinese to English or
| pictures or some abstract structure independent of
| language. Humans have this, but the function in this
| thought experiment is a black box, so we don't know if it
| uses an intermediate representation. Thanks to
| colinmhayes for pointing this out.
|
| Could he give a reasoned answer to "what is the weather"?
| That depends on whether we include external stimuli as
| part of the function input. If not, then neither a human
| nor a computer could give a sensible answer beyond "I
| don't know".
|
| I see now that your issue is really with the function -
| could a function ever exist that gives responses based on
| history/environment/experience. My understanding is that
| such a function is the premise of the thought experiment;
| it's a hypothetical we accept in order to have this
| discussion. Searle claims that even if such a function
| exists, the computer still doesn't truly understand. But
| if that's what we're asking, my answer would be yes, as
| long as history/environment/experience are inputs as
| well. Of course a computer locked away in a room only
| receiving questions as input can never give a real answer
| to "what is the weather", just like a human in that
| situation couldn't. But if we expand our Chinese Room
| test to include that type of question and also allow the
| room or computer to take its environment as input, then
| it can give answers caused by its environment.
|
| > You actually need to show it can be so-implemented. No
| one has done this.
|
| I mean, fair enough. It's fine to say "I won't believe it
| until I see it", but that pretty much ends the
| discussion. If we want to talk about whether something
| not yet achieved is possible, then we need to be willing
| to imagine things that don't exist yet.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > If he could, and the function truly produced a normal
| response to any Chinese phrase in existence, then he
| would speak Chinese
|
| I don't necessarily disagree, but it's not so simple.
| Just because the man speaks chinese doesn't mean he
| understands it. He could have figured out the proper
| output for every possible input without knowing what any
| of it means. If the next person asks in English "what did
| you talk about with the last person?" what would he
| answer, assuming he also speaks english? Really the
| question comes down to if the computer is able to write
| the book by observing I guess, but even then you could
| conceive of a different book with instructions on how to
| write the translation book.
| burkaman wrote:
| You're right, I will edit my comment. Thanks for this
| framing.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The point is that the human in the Chinese room is just
| the hardware, and no one really thinks that any computer
| hardware on its own understands Chinese. It would
| obviously be the entire computational system that
| understands Chinese. The only reason this can even appear
| to be confusing is that we often casually use "computer"
| to refer both to an entire computational system (your
| "implementation of a function") as well as a physical
| piece of hardware (like the box on the floor with a Dell
| sticker on it).
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >I dont think the "systems reply" actually deals with
| this point
|
| To be clear, the point of the systems reply isn't to
| demonstrate how a computational system can understand
| language, it is to point out a loophole such that
| computationalism avoids the main thrust of the Chinese
| room.
|
| >If using a language isnt equivalent to a finite
| computable function -- what is it?
|
| In the Chinese room, the man isn't an embodiment of the
| computable function (algorithm). The man is simply the
| computational engine of the algorithm. The embodied
| algorithm includes the state of the "tape", the unbounded
| stack of paper as "scratch space" used by the man in
| carrying out the instructions of the algorithm. So it
| remains an open question whether the finite computable
| function that implements the language function must "use
| language" in the relevant sense.
|
| What reason is there to think that it does use language
| in the relevant sense? For one, a semantic view of the
| dynamics of the algorithm as it processes the symbols has
| predictive power for the output of the system. Such
| predictive power must be explained. If we assume that the
| room can _in principle_ respond meaningfully and
| substantively to any meaningful Chinese input, we can go
| as far as to say the room is computing over the semantic
| space of the Chinese language embedded in some
| environment context encoded in its dictionary. This is
| because, in the limit of substantive Chinese output for
| all input, there is no way to duplicate the output
| without duplicating the structure, in this case semantic
| structure. The algorithm, in a very straightforward
| sense, is using language to determine appropriate
| responses.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I agree that one should take Searle's argument literally,
| and I doubt there are many people on either side who
| suppose that the room's operator understands either the
| questions being posed to the room or the answers it
| delivers. The dispute is whether there is anything
| significant in this assumption - and, more specifically,
| whether Searle is right in supposing that if Hard AI is
| possible, then it would follow that the room's operator
| _must_ understand the questions, their answers, and why
| they are appropriate answers.
|
| You may recognize that, by distinguishing between the
| operator and the room, I am prefiguring the so-called
| "systems reply", which is that the system as a whole is
| demonstrating whatever level of understanding is manifest
| here, and there is no assumption, in so supposing, that
| this understanding is manifest in any single component,
| _even if one of those components has the ability to
| understand some things on its own._ By deliberate
| construction, Searle is using the room 's operator to
| mechanistically implement an algorithm, a task that does
| not require knowledge of the language in which the
| questions are posed (in fact, he is using the language
| barrier to _prevent_ the operator answering the questions
| himself.) Searle has not presented an argument for the
| operator needing to do anything more, and it is obvious
| that people can be trained to perform tasks they do not
| have any understanding of beyond the specific actions
| involved.
|
| Searle's attempt to refute this reply seems to show that
| he cannot even conceive it fully, as that response is to
| modify the scenario such that the operator memorizes the
| rule book, as if where it is stored makes any difference.
|
| Searle's stance here seems to me to be a version of the
| homunculus fallacy, supposing that our minds are
| _implemented by_ (as opposed to _being_ ) a conscious
| entity.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I think it is significant that the room, even as a
| system, does not _use_ language.
|
| A hashtable lookup cannot be what it is to "act in the
| world with words".
|
| When I say, "do you like what I'm wearing?" -- regardless
| of what has been written in any book, at any time, I do
| not want _that_ reply.
|
| I may want those _words_. But the reply I want is to use
| _your_ judgement of taste and experiences of the world to
| tell me _your opinion_. The words dont answer the
| question if the _reason_ they are used is incorrect.
|
| A hashtable lookup can, basically, never be a reason to
| use words.
|
| And hence the Chinese room reveals much much more than
| simply a circular point. And the systems reply fails to
| say much much less than it needs to.
|
| The systems reply needs to explain "by what system" the
| system's use of language counts as a use. "by what
| system" words are born of understanding, not "mere
| reterival".
|
| To do this, you need to specify the whole world,
| experience, etc. as "computational systems". And thus the
| systems reply simply fails against this example. It isnt
| sufficient to say "maybe" you have to say, "and this is
| how!".
|
| And worse, the world is clearly not a computer -- as any
| non-trivial definition (eg., universal turing machine)
| cannot simulate properties the world has (non-
| determinism, chaos, etc.).
| mannykannot wrote:
| In your first post in this thread you wrote "the Chinese
| room needs to be taken super-literally" - a sentiment I
| agreed with - but since then (starting immediately
| afterwards, in fact) you seem to think that Searle is
| restricting the capabilities of the room to those of a
| hash table. I am pretty sure that a close reading of his
| paper will fail to reveal any such restriction, and, in
| fact, if it did, that would count _against_ his argument.
| Similarly, nothing you say, here or elsewhere among these
| replies, about the limitations of hash tables, supports
| Searle 's argument (or more general arguments against
| Hard AI.)
|
| Nor is Searle arguing that the Chinese room, if it could
| be implemented, must use language (beyond the
| capabilities that he does require of it, which is
| answering questions from an ill-defined domain.) And as
| far as I can tell, he does not require it to, as you
| somewhat vaguely put it, "act in the world with words"
| beyond this.
|
| The systems reply does not need to do anything more than
| show that Searle is making some unargued-for assumptions
| about what Hard AI would imply - and Searle's response to
| it so completely misses the point of that reply that he
| is actually helping make it clear! (For more details, see
| the second paragraph of my previous post; as far as I can
| tell, no argument has been raised against the points I
| made there.)
|
| The limitations of Turing machines are similarly beside
| the point. A computer, such as those involved in the
| composition and delivery of this reply, is not just a
| Turing machine (not even a universal one), even though it
| is capable of implementing one (up to the physical limits
| of memory). In particular, a computer (as opposed to a
| Turing machine) can incorporate environmental inputs,
| including physically-derived entropy, and can use these
| in simulating physical processes.
|
| You are evidently fond of the phrase "[Reality/the world]
| is not a computer"; that may be so, but rather more
| definitively, I think, one can say that the mind _is_ an
| information processor.
|
| I understand that it seems inconceivable to you that a
| mind could be produced by a suitably-programmed computer
| of any power, and I am aware that I can only offer hand-
| wavy arguments for that proposition. I think you are
| mistaken, however, to read Searle's Chinese Room argument
| as being about, let alone supporting, the broader
| intuitions you have expressed in your reply to me and to
| others. Searle, who is, after all, a philosopher of
| considerable stature, is well aware that you need
| something more than just one's intuitions to make a
| respectable argument; that alone would not pass peer
| review.
| 3np wrote:
| > The chinese room needs to be taken super-literally:
| does the person just doing a "hash-table lookup" on "the
| right answers to pre-prosed questions" actually
| understand.
|
| That's not how it's phrased. The Chinese Room needs to
| pass the Turing Test with arbitrary input of Chinese
| characters. So a convincing Chinese Elissa basically.
|
| > The issue here is that if "computer" isnt just a
| trivial property it has to include, eg., measurability,
| determinism, etc. Properties that reality lacks. Reality
| isnt a computer.
|
| Reality isn't a human brain either.
|
| Or is it?
|
| Either way I don't see how that is relevant.
| burkaman wrote:
| > does the person just doing a "hash-table lookup" on
| "the right answers to pre-prosed questions" actually
| understand.
|
| The person doesn't, but the (person + hash-table) system
| does. This is not weird - presumably whoever wrote the
| hash-table did understand Chinese. The whole point of
| using a room for this thought experiment is that we're no
| longer talking about a person, we're talking about a
| "machine" consisting of a person, a hash-table, and some
| kind of input/output system.
|
| The hypothetical computer is the same. The CPU does not
| understand Chinese, but the whole computer as a system
| does, because part of that system is actual knowledge
| that came from someone that understands Chinese. When
| people ask if a computer is intelligent, they are not
| asking about one particular component, they're asking
| about the computer as a whole. Just like when you talk
| about a human's knowledge and abilities, you don't ask
| about particular sectors of their brain, you ask about
| the person as a whole.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The person is frivolous in the Chinese room though, would
| you say (robot + hash table) understands Chinese? I.e.
| GTP-3 understands English...
| burkaman wrote:
| GPT-3 isn't there yet, but yes, a robot with the book
| from the Chinese Room experiment would form a system that
| understands Chinese.
|
| I agree that the person is frivolous, that's why it's
| strange that Searle asks whether the person in his
| thought experiment understands Chinese. That's
| irrelevant, what matters is whether the room as a whole
| does, and clearly it does.
| [deleted]
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I'm not sure. Say the person has translations tables for
| english and chinese. If the second tester asked in
| English "what did you talk about with the last person?"
| would the man be able to answer? Clearly the man + hash
| table speaks chinese, but I don't think that's the same
| as understanding it.
| burkaman wrote:
| That depends on the premise of this new thought
| experiment. Are the program-books allowed to include side
| effects of writing down records of interactions, and take
| those records as input? If not, it's not a fair
| comparison with a computer. If so, then yes I think the
| room could be able to answer.
|
| Why did I have to add something, if the room already
| understood Chinese before? Because we're essentially
| adding a second program now and trying to share
| understanding between them. The room did understand
| Chinese, but that understanding will not be accessible to
| a new component unless we design with that in mind. An
| analogy would be asking a person "which muscles did you
| use to digest that food?" Clearly some part of the human-
| system knows this, because it activated the right muscles
| and successfully digested the food, but the part of the
| system that hears and responds to English doesn't have
| access to that knowledge. We would need to redesign the
| system and programs in order to share understanding
| between these different parts of the system.
|
| I realize we were using the term "hash-table" in this
| thread and what I'm talking about wouldn't be possible
| with just tables, but such a simple program is not a
| requirement for the thought experiment. The idea is we
| just have some black box function that takes inputs and
| produces outputs and we don't know how it works.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| ... I'm finding it very difficult to phrase this argument
| about _actually understanding_ in a way that wouldn't
| also entail that chairs made of atoms (and--
| overwhelmingly--empty space) don't _actually exist_ ,
| they are mere simulacra of real chairs (which don't exist
| anywhere). Which might be a consistent position, but I'd
| instead say that it is simply a largely useless
| interpretation of the word _actually_ and as good
| philosophers we should search for a better one. (See also
| Anderson's "More is different".)
|
| Or is there such a phrasing?
| mjburgess wrote:
| Approximately,
|
| You "actually understand" if in saying words, w, about a
| situation, s, the reason, r, you say those words counts
| as as an understanding of s.
|
| So if you're asked, "what is the weather today?" and a
| system replies, "its sunny" -- it only understands if the
| reason it replied was because its saying "sunny" had come
| about because it understands sunny sitations; and
| therefore has a justfiied reason on this occasion to say
| that this occasion is sunny.
|
| If I ask a NN trained on a trillion documents, "do you
| like what I'm wearing?" it cannot _answer_. It can say
| the words, "yes I do!" but it cannot have a reason to
| say those words. It's just a "weighted average retrievla
| across a compressed dataset of a trillion documetns".
|
| The question isnt "on average, what -- historically --
| would a generic person reply to the question: do you like
| what i'm wearing?"
|
| The question is if the systems _likes_ what I 'm wearing.
| Its replies are only "actual replies" if it can see what
| i'm wearing, has experiences/preferences for taste, has
| some aesthetic judgement, has a disposition to
| like/dislike -- etc.
|
| No ML system on the planet, in this sense, has any
| understanding whatsoever. Interpolation over historical
| data is just a means of compressing history into
| parameters, ie., its a compressed lookup table. That
| isn't ever a /reason/, exactly, if a person simply used
| such a table -- they wouldnt mean what they said
| tshaddox wrote:
| Okay, but how do you test whether any speaker (human or
| otherwise) _understands_ something without asking them to
| explain it? If you have some other test (like perhaps
| some analysis of what the human brain is doing when it is
| understanding something), great! But even then, why can
| 't the computer do the same thing that the human brain is
| doing which constitutes understanding? Or if the only
| test is to ask the speaker to explain something to you,
| well then, the Chinese room can do that too! Of course
| you end up with an infinite regress where you can ask the
| speaker to explain the previous explanation forever, but
| that's true for human speakers as well.
| mjburgess wrote:
| The question is whether what _causes_ us to understand
| things is a computational process.
|
| See my comment to the other reply, an others in this
| thread about chaos/non-determinism to see why I doubt.
|
| Ie., I dont think our organic growth and adaption to our
| environment, in being profoundly chaotic (and via QM,
| thef. non-deterministic) is likely to be describable as a
| computable function.
| vlowther wrote:
| Given that your squishy brainmeats also consist of neural
| networks that have been trained directly by years of
| experience and indirectly by billions of years of
| evolution, I can write off your response as just a
| weighted average retrieval across a compressed dataset of
| trillions of your experiences.
| mjburgess wrote:
| If, on the occasion I say, "I like you" my saying it is
| _caused_ by _my liking you_ -- then you can describe this
| process however you wish.
|
| Since my liking you is caused by my immediate
| environment, it isn't reducible to a weighted average of
| my history.
|
| Another way of putting it: the historical positions of
| all the molecules in some water aren't sufficient to
| determine its present state. It's state depends on its
| container (ie., the pressure & temp of its environment).
| And there are a very very large number of states of
| water, many still being discovered.
|
| In this sense my state in any moment is a point in an
| infinite space of states -- not determined by my history.
| But also _extremely complexly_ by my container -- my
| social, etc. environment. The world hitting my senses is
| doing more to me than the air on the water. It induces in
| me a state which cannot be "averaged" from my history.
|
| Thus, no, we are not weighed averages of our histories.
| We are profoundly chaotic and organic organisms whose
| growth in our environments enables us to respond to our
| enviroments by entering a near infinite number of states.
| These states arent in our history, they are how our
| biophysical structure -- via history -- responses to the
| near infinite depth of the here-and-now.
|
| We are more like water than a computer. A computer is a
| deterministic machine which is a deterministic function
| of its deterministic inputs. Water is a chatoic system
| whose state "isnt up to it". Water's state is /in/ its
| container, and water itself is a non-determinsitic
| chatoic soup.
|
| The chaos of water is the least of what one nanometer of
| a cell has; a cell is a trillion times that adaptive and
| responsive. And we are a trillion of those.
|
| We are a cascade of chaotic state changes provoked by an
| infinitely rich environment action on our bodies shaped
| by a long history of organic growth.
|
| We don't have "neural networks", we have cells. That some
| form "networks" has nothing to do with what we are. A
| complete misdirection.
| mannykannot wrote:
| > Since my liking you is caused by my immediate
| environment, it isn't reducible to a weighted average of
| my history.
|
| It is not clear to me that this cannot be the case of a
| weighted average very heavily weighted to the immediate
| past.
|
| > The historical positions of all the molecules in some
| water aren't sufficient to determine its present state.
| It's state depends on its container (ie., the pressure &
| temp of its environment).
|
| AFAIK, given that you could determine the momenta of the
| molecules from a history of their positions, this would
| be sufficient to determine its state (maybe you need
| their spin as well?) The relevant information about the
| container has been impressed on the motion of the
| molecules.
|
| Similarly, we can suppose that the history of your
| environment becomes manifest in your mental states (and a
| predisposition towards certain state transitions) -
| though, on account of the complexity of that environment,
| in a compressed form.
|
| > We are more like water than a computer. A computer is a
| deterministic machine which is a deterministic function
| of its deterministic inputs. Water is a chatoic system
| whose state "isnt up to it". Water's state is /in/ its
| container, and water itself is a non-determinsitic
| chatoic soup.
|
| And yet we can usefully model fluid dynamics on a
| computer, _even though the mathematical representation of
| the problem is analytically intractable._ This line of
| argument does not appear to be leading in the direction
| you think it does.
|
| > We don't have "neural networks", we have cells. That
| some form "networks" has nothing to do with what we are.
| A complete misdirection.
|
| I am generally distrustful of these ontological arguments
| - quite often, it seems, things that were once thought of
| as being completely different turned out to be similar in
| some relevant way.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > If consciousness is a relational property of a system
|
| But first you have to establish this is true.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Not really. The point is that as an argument against
| computationalism about the mind, Searle's Chinese room
| can't rule out computationalism if mind is merely a
| relational property of a system.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The Chinese room was _originally_ an argument against the
| consciousness of automatons, but then EPR was an argument
| against (fundamental) entanglement, Bell more or less
| expected his inequality to hold, Michaelson-Morley was
| interpreted as having found the luminiferous aether, and the
| Poisson (aka Arago) spot was a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
| wave theory of light. All of these things aren't obsolete,
| they are still useful pieces of insight, but the state of the
| art regarding how they should be conceptualized has moved on
| from what their originators thought.
|
| Which is not an argument _for_ any particular intepretation
| of the Chinese room, it's only to say that the _bare_ fact
| that the original author thought of it in a particular way
| doesn't mean we should do so.
| retrac wrote:
| The Chinese Room is useful as an idea or model, even if you
| don't agree with the original interpretation. I am fond of
| the view that the room is potentially conscious, with human
| or machine worker. The worker should expect to understand the
| conversation they are mechanically carrying out no more than
| your individual brain cells ought to expect to understand.
| guerrilla wrote:
| They do [1][2]*.
|
| 1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-complexity/
|
| 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computability/
|
| * Note that the OP is even cited there.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I approached people in the Phil Dept where I work, and they
| expressed only polite interest (i.e., disinterest). So from my
| (very limited) survey, there may be folks willing to write
| entries, but, that I can tell, there is not broad interest.
| sharker8 wrote:
| Are we talking continental or analytic philosophers?
| nathias wrote:
| We should and do, but Chineese room is a philosophically unsound
| analogy.
| hristov wrote:
| So they can get better jobs? Rimshot.
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