Talks at Google
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2015–2017
1:10:38 · 482K views · Dec 4, 2015
John Searle's Talk at Google on consciousness and artificial intelligence, hosted by Google's Singularity Network. He presents his philosophy of mind and Chinese room argument that computation is syntactic and cannot capture semantics.
Used as a source for Searle's own argument in Chinese room discussions, though some find nothing new in it.
5 comments from Hacker News
Philosophy is not some sort of church where everyone praise some emotionally agreed upon idea... You seems to be turning this into some sort of us vs. them game based on your faulty projections, so I hope to stop here. (Btw, If you are getting your ideas about philosophy from popular youtube channels like [LINK] or [LINK] , maybe I can understand why you have such misunderstandings) ----------- If you happen to be interested anytime, you can start with some very introductory resources I bothered to look up for you (most are video, they are easy to consume): + Donald Hoffman - computational theory of mind, someone closer to HN's demographic ( [LINK] ) + John Searl is good speaker so try his talk ( this video ) + Some thought experiments (remember that thought experiments are not highlighters of issue, not complete arguments) [LINK] + If you want to know what a complete technical work looks like, here's one I've been reading: [LINK] + Not agreed upon but a fun one to not include - about: what is philosophy: [LINK] + Science vs philosophy sort of video, slow but good discussion in there: [LINK] + [LINK] In the unlikely case that you become very interested, you can look up "Introduction to philosophy of mind syllabus" and go through the materials and/or books of your choice on the subject. ----------- > What is the philosophical method for interrogation an empirical phenomenon That would go into philosophy of science, which I have absolutely no familiarity with. I'm guessing, to a p
I was not trying to connect rule 110 to Searle's argument per se, but rather to the critique of Searle's argument. Namely, that criticisms of the lookup table are not criticisms of Searle's argument or the point he makes. a C++ program, brainf k, a CA, a one instruction set computer, or whatever computational process is used doesn't matter. The lookup table is just one component of the Rooms operation. I agree Searle is talking about a hash table, but he is also talking about the rules to interface an input value to a set of possible output values via some mechanical process, and the man in the room acts as a kind of stack machine. You are right, Searle isn't making an argument about the translation of sentences. (translating them to what?) He is making an argument about how the mechanism of computation cannot capture semantic content. He explains this in the google video very well: this video And all of the... let's call them "structural" critiques are moot. Searle's point is that computer systems cannot understand semantic content because they are syntactic processing machines. And he shows this with his argument. The opposite view is that computers can understand semantic content. (so there is understanding and there is meaning understood by the computer) and the reason Searle doesn't believe computers can do this is because his argument is flawed. Which leaves us with a small set of options: 1) That the structure Searle proposes can in fact understand semantic content and Se
Your points are all good. But they have nothing to do with meaning, or with semantics. Cellular automata are lookup tables, and Wolfram and others proved some cellular automata rules are Turing complete computers. [LINK] My point was merely about the equivalence of computational mechanisms, not about lookup tables per se. And by corollary, that the computational complexity is equivalent regardless of the computational mechanism. (I think we agree on this point.) Searle's Room is a just to explain that what computers are doing is syntactic. Searle would posit that passing a Turing test in any amount of time is irrelevant to determining consciousness. It's a story we hypothetical use to "measure" intelligence, but it's only a story. it's not a valid test for sentience, and passing such a test would not confer sentience. Sentience is an entirely different question. What would be more interesting is if a computer intentionally failed turing tests because it thinks turing tests are stupid. We could test humans with Turing tests to determine their "level" of intelligence. But if you put teenage boys in a room and made them do Turing tests, pretty quick they would come up with remarkable ways to fail those tests, chiefly by not doing them! How could you write a program or create a system that intentionally fails Turing tests? or a program which avoids taking turing tests... because it thinks they are stupid? Could you write a program that knows when it fails? (it's a pretty long sta
There isn't much new here. Skip ahead to the first audience question from Ray Kurzweil ( this video ). Kurzweil, in summary, asks "You say that a machine manipulating symbols can't have consciousness. Why is this different than consciousness arising neurons manipulating neurotransmitter concentrations?" Searle gives a non-answer: "My dog has consciousness because I can look at it and conclude that it has consciousness."
Searle would have us interpret this as the company taking the intelligence of the humans, refining and repackaging it. this video