I am not sure if I read it here or on SSC, but someone tried to estimate how a “mary’s room” equivalent for the human brain would look like. A moon sized library on which robotic crawlers run around at decent fractions of c …
I mean, what if there is a person not understanding Chinese in a room, operating the Chinese symbols they don’t understand, according to formal rules that make no sense to them. The system already “knows” (on the symbol level, not the person who operates it) everything about the “red” color, but it has never perceived the red color in its input. And then, one day, it receives the red color in the input. If there is an unusual response by the system, what exactly caused it? (For extra layer of complication, let’s suppose that the inputs to the “Chinese room” are bit streams containing JPEG images, so even the person operating the room has never seen the red color.)
To add more context, what if the perceived red object is a trolley running down the railway track...
To add more context, what if the perceived red object is a trolley running down the railway track...
What if the Chinese room is operated by trolleys running on tracks and the signaling system works by putting some (smaller) number of fat people and some (greater) number of slim people onto appropriate tracks? X-0
If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron of a native speaker’s brain, then probably we’d be talking about a “rule book” at leas the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light. When you put it that way, maybe it’s not so hard to imagine this enormous Chinese-speaking entity that we’ve brought into being might have something we’d be prepared to call understanding or insight.
I am not sure if I read it here or on SSC, but someone tried to estimate how a “mary’s room” equivalent for the human brain would look like. A moon sized library on which robotic crawlers run around at decent fractions of c …
Anybody having info on that?
When you say “mary’s room”, do you actually mean Chinese Room rather than Mary’s Room?
What if Mary is Chinese? :P
I mean, what if there is a person not understanding Chinese in a room, operating the Chinese symbols they don’t understand, according to formal rules that make no sense to them. The system already “knows” (on the symbol level, not the person who operates it) everything about the “red” color, but it has never perceived the red color in its input. And then, one day, it receives the red color in the input. If there is an unusual response by the system, what exactly caused it? (For extra layer of complication, let’s suppose that the inputs to the “Chinese room” are bit streams containing JPEG images, so even the person operating the room has never seen the red color.)
To add more context, what if the perceived red object is a trolley running down the railway track...
See also: Can Bad Men Make Good Brains Do Bad Things?. That’s a JSTOR article which won’t be accessible for most readers, but some kind person has copied out its content here.
[EDITED to use a slightly better choice of some-kind-person.]
What if the Chinese room is operated by trolleys running on tracks and the signaling system works by putting some (smaller) number of fat people and some (greater) number of slim people onto appropriate tracks? X-0
...and then one day you find a giraffe on tracks.
Reminds me of this.
Huh. Indeed and of course I obviously mean chinese room. Might be enough help, thanks!
I think I have seen it in Scott Aaronson’s lecture notes.
Found it already. chinese instead of marys room yielded http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/01/book-review-and-highlights-quantum-computing-since-democritus/