A Discussion of Artificial Intelligence with John Searle and Luciano Floridi

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Channel: Fritt Ord

Views: 42,902

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Turing Test, Turing Machine, John Searle, Chinese Room, A Theory of Perception, Consciousness, Computing, Luciano Floridi, Oxford Internet Institute

Id: b6o_7HeowY8

Length: 102min 21sec (6141 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/respeckKnuckles]

First five minutes of Searle's part and already I've learned something. The man is a masterful lecturer, regardless of how much you might disagree with him. The distinction he draws between epistemic subjectivity, epistemic objectivity, ontological subjectivity and ontological objectivity: is this really as neglected in philosophy as he claims? Is it something that's taught to undergraduates?

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks for posting this. It was interesting to see both speakers more or less agreeing on the fundamental points, namely the hard distinction between syntax and semantics and the failings of the computational theory of consciousness. It was funny to hear Searle mention that it made him nervous! As he himself pointed out, in the early 80s when the Chinese Room was first published in the early cognitive science milieu, his account was controversial in the extreme, with hundreds of refutations published in a short period. In watching this video and in seeing recent work in the field, particularly in embedded cognition and recent reevaluations (including from Fodor himself) of the Language of Thought hypothesis, I'm wondering how much the intellectual pendulum has swung away from computationalism and towards (as Searle prefers) essentially neurobiological accounts of consciousness.

[u/SingularityIsNigh]

To take the Chinese Room as an argument that machines cannot think begs the question rather than addressing it. it constructs a particular version of a machine that purports to be thinking, and says, "Surely you don't think there's any real understanding going on here, do you?" The best answer is "Why not?"

If the world is purely physical, then what we mean by "understanding" is a way of talking about a particular correlation between information located in once system (as instantiated in some particular arrangement of matter) and conditions in the external world. Nothing in the Chinese Room example indicated that we shouldn't think that way, unless you are already convinced we don't.

-Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

[Searle] is saying that understanding (consciousness) is not magical but is specific to biology, and cannot be reproduced in silicon (only simulated). I think this is incorrect. The Chinese Room Argument does not lead to the conclusion that neurons are necessary, only that information processing is not sufficient.

-Steven Novella, AI and the Chinese Room Argument