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Chinese Room Pseudo-Experiment And Solipsism
How does Searle avoid this?

Chinese Room Pseudo-Experiment And Solipsism

MarchHare
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Posted 08/28/09 - 02:10 PM: Subject: Chinese Room Pseudo-Experiment And Solipsism	#1
If one takes it as a consequence that endorsing the Chinese Room pseudo-experiment commits one to the methodology of inquiry whereby external observation of behaviours can never amount to proof justifying the inferring of a mind; so that only internal awareness of our own intentionality is sufficient to infer the existence of a mind and not just a computer manifesting all the behaviours of a mind; then how does one escape solipsism? For example, let's say I meet with someone I know: I can see them manifest behaviours similar to my own; I can speak to them and have (what appears to me to be) semantically significant conversations, but I can have no epistemic access to their particular intentional states. I can never infer, under Searle's methodology of inquiry, whether they possess intentional mental states analogous to my own. I personally would be quite content to infer the existence of programs within the human brain that are sufficientely comparable to my own to infer intentionality in other humans, though of course it's the input/output processes of generic behaviour that are what I would use to tell if I'm looking at a human or an advanced robot. I suspect one of these three things has happened- (1) I've misunderstood some features of the Chinese Room pseudo-experiment and there's no methodological committment here at all. (2) Searle has some provisio which acts as a safety valve against solipsism. (3) Both (1) and (2). Which is it?
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

swstephe
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Posted 08/28/09 - 10:44 PM:	#2
Solipsism is the idea that nothing exists except the self. The Chinese room in having something you can examine is admitting a reality outside one's self, so it isn't solipsism, but that may be a problem with terms. What you seem to have stumbled upon is the "question of other minds" also known as "the hard question". The Chinese room doesn't answer that question, but actually directly addresses how to deal with the question. You may be the only consciousness in the world and the rest of us are just philosophical zombies, (mmm, brains). Since you can't prove it, you can just assume that we have a compatible form of consciousness -- and so can computers, simulations and actual zombies.
Ethics is the measuring of morality. Morality is the measuring of good. Good is the measuring of benefit. Benefit is the measure of values.

MarchHare
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Posted 08/29/09 - 07:22 AM:	#3
swstephe wrote: Solipsism is the idea that nothing exists except the self. The Chinese room in having something you can examine is admitting a reality outside one's self, so it isn't solipsism, but that may be a problem with terms. What you seem to have stumbled upon is the "question of other minds" also known as "the hard question". The Chinese room doesn't answer that question, but actually directly addresses how to deal with the question. You may be the only consciousness in the world and the rest of us are just philosophical zombies, (mmm, brains). Since you can't prove it, you can just assume that we have a compatible form of consciousness -- and so can computers, simulations and actual zombies. Thanks: I was getting my terms wrong with solipsism. I don't think it's the case that we can't prove the existence of other minds (though this is of course very contingent on what is meant by "prove") but I don't see how Searle can infer the existence of other minds of humans if he has no means to infer the existence of a mind in a computer that displays every observable form of human behaviour, sans being organic. If this is so, it seems a pretty glaring problem with the thrust of the Chinese Room pseudo-experiment.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

Cuthbert
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Posted 09/11/09 - 08:00 AM:	#4
I don't think he's trying to prove the existence of other minds. He's trying to show that an automated algorithmic procedure such as that undertaken by a computer does not add up to thinking. It's simulated thinking. But simulated thinking is no more thinking than simulated flying is flying. You can get your pocket calculator to add 3 and 5 for you. But it doesn't understand addition, even though what it does looks just like what you do when you add 3 and 5. But you do understand addition. (If you don't, why have you got a calculator? And anyway, why are you doing such easy sums on it?)

ragus
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Posted 09/11/09 - 09:03 AM:	#5
Cuthbert wrote He's trying to show that an automated algorithmic procedure such as that undertaken by a computer does not add up to thinking. He tries to show that there is no understanding (of Chinese) by the card-shuffler in the room. A machine can process data and the output will be indentical to a human following an algorithm which they don't understand but can use. Understanding is different from simple know-how-to-use thinking.
"A word in your ear is like an untethered goat in a field" Wittigenstein

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