Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange
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Questions tagged [chinese-room-argument]

For questions relating to the concept of the Chinese Room Argument.

The Chinese Room Argument states that an AI is not really "human" in reality, no matter how realistic it behaves. It also states that an AI is simply trained to recognize patterns. It also is an argument against viewing the human brain as a CPU.

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Is the "Chinese room" an explanation of how ChatGPT works?

Sorry if this question makes no sense. I'm a software developer but know very little about AI. Quite a while ago, I read about the Chinese room, and the person inside who has had a lot of training/instructions how to combine symbols, and, as a…
Guntram Blohm
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How does one prove comprehension in machines?

Say we have a machine and we give it a task to do (vision task, language task, game, etc.), how can one prove that a machine actually know's what's going on/happening in that specific task? To narrow it down, some examples: Conversation - How would…
Landon G
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Why is reinforcement learning not the answer to AGI?

I previously asked a question about How can an AI freely make decisions?. I got a great answer about how current algorithms lack agency. The first thing I thought of was reinforcement learning, since the entire concept is oriented around an agent…
joethemow
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Does the Chinese Room argument hold against AI?

Back in college, I had a Complexity Theory teacher who stated that artificial intelligence was a contradiction in terms. If it could be calculated mechanically, he argued, it wasn't intelligence, it was math. This seems to be a variant of the…
S.L. Barth is on codidact.com
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Why is the Chinese Room argument such a big deal?

I've been re-reading the Wikipedia article on the Chinese Room argument and I'm... actually quite unimpressed by it. It seems to me to be largely a semantic issue involving the conflation of various meanings of the word "understand". Of course,…
wizzwizz4
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Is the Cognitive Approach (SOAR) equivalent to the Chinese Room argument?

Soar is a cognitive architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soar_(cognitive_architecture) https://soar.eecs.umich.edu/ There is something called "the Chinese box" or "Chinese room" argument: …
EngrStudent
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What are examples of thought experiments against or in favour of strong AI, apart from the Chinese room argument?

The Chinese Room argument against strong AI overlooks the fact that "the man in the room" is acting as a macro-scale "neurotransmitter" of the larger system in which he resides. It does not rule out strong AI, it simply reduces to an enigmatic…
respectful
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What are the implications of the statement "If you can't tell, does it matter?" in relation to AI?

"If you can't tell, does it matter?" was one of the first lines of dialogue of the Westworld television series, presented as a throwaway in the first episode of the first season, in response to the question "Are you real?" In the sixth episode of…
DukeZhou
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Is understanding understandable?

While wandering about the ability of Large Language Models to understand, and the Chinese room argument (related question Is the "Chinese room" an explanation of how ChatGPT works?) I got into a mess with the very idea of understanding.…
Jaume Oliver Lafont
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Is there a formal name for this philosophical AI problem?

Expressed in my own words: Suppose we create something that passes all of our tests and is indistinguishable from another human. How can you know if this is truly a conscious being as a human is, or simply a simulation of conscience? What is…
Tim Atkinson
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