I'd be glad to go over the argument with you, starting with your understanding.
Though I'm not the original poster, I would like to take you up on your offer, assuming it's genuine.
To start with, I don't actually believe that strong AI is possible (based largely on my belief that ESP and other phenomena non-reducible to the functionalist/materialist account have been demonstrated - see the book in my sig for Kelly & Kelly's textbook covering the subject). So, a priori, I ought to be disposed to agree with Searle, because I agree with his conclusion.
However I too find the Chinese Room simply a bad strawman in that I don't believe the model of AI which it attempts to refute actually exists.
Let's start with this: in order for the Chinese Room, as a system, to pass the Turing test (we're assuming it does or it wouldn't even be a contender for AI), then it must not simply return valid Chinese sentences, but sentences correlating to the simulated Chinese speaker's emotional state.
That means that the rules the man is following must not only transform English sentences into Chinese sentences, but must also simulate an entire, Turing-plausible (ie indistinguishable from human), human personality. That means that that human personality must be encoded in the workings of the room.
Now, you could certainly argue that the man isn't aware of this simulated personality, but I can't see how, if the room is pasing the Turing test, that such a simulated personality doesn't exist.
What I believe is that no such simulated personality can in fact be built - I suspect because the human mind is actually infinite. For one thing, since I believe in ESP, I think that any constructed AI would fail a test of remote viewing or precognition while a normal human would succeed (though granted, our techniques for validating ESP are still controversial, but Bem et al seem to show that it's a normal human function). But I think, following Kelly & Kelly, that we'll find that many other more ordinary aspects of human congition - such as dreams, intuition, and emotion - actually have 'spooky' sources which are not reducible to symbolic manipulation.
So in the end, I agree with Searle's conclusions, but I think his Room is a vast oversimplification of the real problem of AI, and relies on an unfair emotive response to a caricature of AI, not a real AI.
America is fast becoming the Portugal of the Space Age.
We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things *, because, um...... hey, a shiny thing! What was I saying?
* 'Doing' is hereinafter defined as 'blowing up real good'. 'The other things' include but are not limited to: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, Challenger, Nicaragua, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Columbia, Iraq, subprime mortgages, and spam.
I'm sorry sir, but I just don't see how the Spacecorps directive that "gentlemen prefer blondes" applies to polar-crossing Molniya orbits with a 63.5 degree inclina - oh, the other Monroe.
Putting men, and colonies, into space wouldn't help to ensure mankind's survival is the least, in the event of a cataclysmic impact, would it?.
No, it's not at all clear that space colonies would help ensure mankind's survival at all for the following reasons:
1. Current and near-future space colonies are nowhere near self-sufficient. They require constant shipping of oxygen, water, food and fuel from Earth. Anything that disrupts the space launch industry - let alone wider civilisation - will hit the colonies first, not last.
2. Sealed biodomes are really hard to pull off. Remember Biosphere II? Failed after two runs, and that was here on Earth with easy access to repairs. Turns out balancing closed ecosystems is very tricky, so they will be as fragile as shipping up food and fuel was. Without constant intervention, the domes in space will fall apart too when civilisation crumbles.
3. So while we're building our space colonies, we'll also be building a shipping network to support them. So what's about the most plausible Earth-extinction event? A plague of some sort. What will happen to that plague? It won't just be limited to Earth - it'll spread through everywhere humans have transport networks. Nine months after it hits earth, it'll be on Mars. We gain nothing from moving into space.
4. What's the next-most likely world-ender? A war. What are the chances that highly motivated humans with space capability are going to ignore the whole space infrastructure they spent decades building? Um, about zero. Expect nukes in your Martian biodomes on the same schedule as the plague - or within 20 minutes if the war is a civil war or revolution.
5. Okay, so say we crack the biodome problem and get plausible midfuture colonies on Mars which are totally self-supporting: no need for fuel, food or water or oxygen from Earth, no need for data or comms or any reliance on mission control specialists. And they have self-sufficient military defense, a unified and separate political culture, completely safe. When the apocalypse comes, we can completely pull up stakes and live on Luna or Mars. We'll be safe not just from plague and war but the more exotic world-enders that don't end the whole solar system - like, say, asteroids. Awesome!
6. Well yes, but you get there the hard way. See, an asteroid impact won't completely melt the Earth - if you can build sealed biodomes on Mars, you can for certain build sealed biodomes on Earth for cheaper. And they'll survive just fine. So... you could have skipped the whole Mars bit, just built some strongholds on Earth, and the human race is saved, on a budget.
7. But.... space!
Yes, space is cool, but the numbers don't seem to add up.
has a major hard-on for Linux and, like a rabid dog, he's not going to unclench his jaws from the smoke he's holding... yelling into some one else's microphone... Hitler
Ding! You win the coveted George Orwell Octopus In The Melting Pot Award for Gratuitious Weirding of Metaphors.
Or, restated in a somewhat more sensible manner, "if the alleged source you citied isn't accessible on the Web, there's no way for anyone editing your article who doesn't have a triple doctorate, a $10,000 subscription to the specialist journal you quoted and a dozen plane tickets to visit museums, to check that it does, in fact, exist, and that you're not just making it up. So don't expect to get treated like an expert if you can't prove that you are an expert."
In a world where we have scanners and OCR, there's no longer any technical reason for ANYTHING to not be on the Web, except for the wilful choice to withhold it from public accessibility. Sadly, a lot of science does remain wilfully locked away from public verification - but that's hardly Wikipedia's fault, is it?
He has laid out a good case explaining why the U.S. isn't dumping its investment to start over. What he is wondering about is why no one else is trying it, either. Think of China
Didn't he also answer that in the first part of the article, though? He spent a number of paragraphs to remind us that there's nothing actually worth spending money going into space for, except for communication satellites, the market for which in geosync is limited by the number of orbital slots which are now full, and which cost tens of thousands of dollars per pound in engineering for the extreme environment of space without even considering the particular launch method.
So to sum up: there's no expected commercial payoff for expandede access to space, it cost $4 trillion and the threat of a civilisation-ending war for rockets to enter the market, it might conceivably cost as much for alternative launch methods to get there... so what's the point of the article again?
tldr: space $ = comsats, but we already have enough comsats kthxbye
or is he saying we need more comsats? or there might be magical other things we could do in space if only we didn't need rockets to get there? But he never gets to saying what those might be.
Except for the one time when Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack picked up that Russian icebreaker from the Finn, but the whole Sprawl thinks that's just a legend now.
Not even close. I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever. I bet most people aren't even aware that there *are* videos on wikipedia
Maybe Wikipedia could popularise its videos as 'W-Tube'?
In other news, the iPod was just a more advanced version of the Diamond Rio, the iPhone is just a more advanced version of the Palm Treo and the iPad is really nothing more than a Poqet PC with more horsepower.
Sometimes, implementation IS everything.
Yes. I had a Palm Treo for years, a Palm Tungsten and III before that, was buying and reading eBooks online back around 1999 - I bought Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet" in 2000 just for kicks - so when the iPhone came out I was "so, now the iPod has finally caught up with the rest of the PDA/smartphone world? About time! By the way, when is Palm going to release a new device?"
But for the media it was all "STEVE JOBES INVENTS SUPER MOBILE INTERTUBES THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!!!"
The iPhone's a nice successor to a category created by others, and it stepped neatly into a niche left wide open by Palm's utter self-disintegration and Microsoft's inexplicable inability to carry through on their temporary lead in the phone space - but it's not the total revolution the tech-unsavvy public seemed (and still seem) to think it was.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be glad to go over the argument with you, starting with your understanding.
Though I'm not the original poster, I would like to take you up on your offer, assuming it's genuine.
To start with, I don't actually believe that strong AI is possible (based largely on my belief that ESP and other phenomena non-reducible to the functionalist/materialist account have been demonstrated - see the book in my sig for Kelly & Kelly's textbook covering the subject). So, a priori, I ought to be disposed to agree with Searle, because I agree with his conclusion.
However I too find the Chinese Room simply a bad strawman in that I don't believe the model of AI which it attempts to refute actually exists.
Let's start with this: in order for the Chinese Room, as a system, to pass the Turing test (we're assuming it does or it wouldn't even be a contender for AI), then it must not simply return valid Chinese sentences, but sentences correlating to the simulated Chinese speaker's emotional state.
That means that the rules the man is following must not only transform English sentences into Chinese sentences, but must also simulate an entire, Turing-plausible (ie indistinguishable from human), human personality. That means that that human personality must be encoded in the workings of the room.
Now, you could certainly argue that the man isn't aware of this simulated personality, but I can't see how, if the room is pasing the Turing test, that such a simulated personality doesn't exist.
What I believe is that no such simulated personality can in fact be built - I suspect because the human mind is actually infinite. For one thing, since I believe in ESP, I think that any constructed AI would fail a test of remote viewing or precognition while a normal human would succeed (though granted, our techniques for validating ESP are still controversial, but Bem et al seem to show that it's a normal human function). But I think, following Kelly & Kelly, that we'll find that many other more ordinary aspects of human congition - such as dreams, intuition, and emotion - actually have 'spooky' sources which are not reducible to symbolic manipulation.
So in the end, I agree with Searle's conclusions, but I think his Room is a vast oversimplification of the real problem of AI, and relies on an unfair emotive response to a caricature of AI, not a real AI.
If I can offer an analogy, it's as though you've confused a hamburger with Freudian Psychology.
So obliquely smug it is, then.
It would have been nice if you could have at least attempted a reasoned discussion.
America is fast becoming the Portugal of the Space Age.
We choose to go to the moon! ... hey, a shiny thing! What was I saying?
We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things *,
because, um...
* 'Doing' is hereinafter defined as 'blowing up real good'. 'The other things' include but are not limited to: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, Challenger, Nicaragua, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Columbia, Iraq, subprime mortgages, and spam.
My other car is space junk.
It get many more miles per galleon.
Pfft, the chances of that are a million to one.
Please be advised that the Monroe Doctrine
I'm sorry sir, but I just don't see how the Spacecorps directive that "gentlemen prefer blondes" applies to polar-crossing Molniya orbits with a 63.5 degree inclina - oh, the other Monroe.
Putting men, and colonies, into space wouldn't help to ensure mankind's survival is the least, in the event of a cataclysmic impact, would it?.
No, it's not at all clear that space colonies would help ensure mankind's survival at all for the following reasons:
1. Current and near-future space colonies are nowhere near self-sufficient. They require constant shipping of oxygen, water, food and fuel from Earth. Anything that disrupts the space launch industry - let alone wider civilisation - will hit the colonies first, not last.
2. Sealed biodomes are really hard to pull off. Remember Biosphere II? Failed after two runs, and that was here on Earth with easy access to repairs. Turns out balancing closed ecosystems is very tricky, so they will be as fragile as shipping up food and fuel was. Without constant intervention, the domes in space will fall apart too when civilisation crumbles.
3. So while we're building our space colonies, we'll also be building a shipping network to support them. So what's about the most plausible Earth-extinction event? A plague of some sort. What will happen to that plague? It won't just be limited to Earth - it'll spread through everywhere humans have transport networks. Nine months after it hits earth, it'll be on Mars. We gain nothing from moving into space.
4. What's the next-most likely world-ender? A war. What are the chances that highly motivated humans with space capability are going to ignore the whole space infrastructure they spent decades building? Um, about zero. Expect nukes in your Martian biodomes on the same schedule as the plague - or within 20 minutes if the war is a civil war or revolution.
5. Okay, so say we crack the biodome problem and get plausible midfuture colonies on Mars which are totally self-supporting: no need for fuel, food or water or oxygen from Earth, no need for data or comms or any reliance on mission control specialists. And they have self-sufficient military defense, a unified and separate political culture, completely safe. When the apocalypse comes, we can completely pull up stakes and live on Luna or Mars. We'll be safe not just from plague and war but the more exotic world-enders that don't end the whole solar system - like, say, asteroids. Awesome!
6. Well yes, but you get there the hard way. See, an asteroid impact won't completely melt the Earth - if you can build sealed biodomes on Mars, you can for certain build sealed biodomes on Earth for cheaper. And they'll survive just fine. So... you could have skipped the whole Mars bit, just built some strongholds on Earth, and the human race is saved, on a budget.
7. But.... space!
Yes, space is cool, but the numbers don't seem to add up.
My internet connection doesn't check for a penis before letting me route traffic.
Oh! So the USB socket isn't for... well, now I feel stupid.
has a major hard-on for Linux and, like a rabid dog, he's not going to unclench his jaws from the smoke he's holding... yelling into some one else's microphone... Hitler
Ding! You win the coveted George Orwell Octopus In The Melting Pot Award for Gratuitious Weirding of Metaphors.
Ah, there's the thing. He bought the business, not the religion.
But not only didn't he buy the religion, he didn't even buy the copyright to the sacred texts.
"if it's not on the web it doesn't exist."
Or, restated in a somewhat more sensible manner, "if the alleged source you citied isn't accessible on the Web, there's no way for anyone editing your article who doesn't have a triple doctorate, a $10,000 subscription to the specialist journal you quoted and a dozen plane tickets to visit museums, to check that it does, in fact, exist, and that you're not just making it up. So don't expect to get treated like an expert if you can't prove that you are an expert."
In a world where we have scanners and OCR, there's no longer any technical reason for ANYTHING to not be on the Web, except for the wilful choice to withhold it from public accessibility. Sadly, a lot of science does remain wilfully locked away from public verification - but that's hardly Wikipedia's fault, is it?
He has laid out a good case explaining why the U.S. isn't dumping its investment to start over. What he is wondering about is why no one else is trying it, either. Think of China
Didn't he also answer that in the first part of the article, though? He spent a number of paragraphs to remind us that there's nothing actually worth spending money going into space for, except for communication satellites, the market for which in geosync is limited by the number of orbital slots which are now full, and which cost tens of thousands of dollars per pound in engineering for the extreme environment of space without even considering the particular launch method.
So to sum up: there's no expected commercial payoff for expandede access to space, it cost $4 trillion and the threat of a civilisation-ending war for rockets to enter the market, it might conceivably cost as much for alternative launch methods to get there... so what's the point of the article again?
tldr: space $ = comsats, but we already have enough comsats kthxbye
or is he saying we need more comsats? or there might be magical other things we could do in space if only we didn't need rockets to get there? But he never gets to saying what those might be.
or even a simple stairway to heaven
I'd start with some kind of zeppelin technology, possibly augmented with light emitting diode propulsion.
Chrome has never been hacked
Except for the one time when Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack picked up that Russian icebreaker from the Finn, but the whole Sprawl thinks that's just a legend now.
1984 indeed. iTelescreen.
1) Total BS, you can choose not to buy the iPad
Yes. Yes, that's exactly how we can stop 2014 being like '1984'.
I'm not sure why Apple would want to get involved in this manner with the greatest evil in our world today, News Corp.
Because they don't want to settle for being the second-greatest? ;)
Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology
Well, and legality (in the USA), which some might consider to be slightly important. But YMMV on that score.
Not even close. I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever. I bet most people aren't even aware that there *are* videos on wikipedia
Maybe Wikipedia could popularise its videos as 'W-Tube'?
Anyone ever read Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness In the Sky"? Sounds like "focus" :D
We have that mind-enslaving procedure already. It's called "Slashdot".
It was blatantly given to someone who had not earned it and did not deserve it, and that person is Henry Kissinger.
Hey, that's unfair. When it came to "make love not war", Henry might not have been the kissingest, but...
So he got the nobel peace prize for something he was supposed to do? That's retarded.
Temporally speaking, it's actually advanced.
scientists dont get PEACE prices, fool.
The price of peace is eternal... um... peaceligance?
For instance, should Truman have got one for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
It would certainly be in the spirit of Nobel's personal contribution to world peace - better living through high explosives.
And who the hell still uses IE? Its a complete joke. Free products (firefox, chrome, opera, etc. etc.) are far superior.
Sadly, there's one place where IE is not only competitive with Firefox but completely outclasses it: enterprise manageability.
Have you ever tried to centrally deploy Firefox patches to 2000 computers? Or apply Firefox proxy settings via Active Directory Group Policy?
Firefox is a joke in the business space, and that's really really sad.
In other news, the iPod was just a more advanced version of the Diamond Rio, the iPhone is just a more advanced version of the Palm Treo and the iPad is really nothing more than a Poqet PC with more horsepower.
Sometimes, implementation IS everything.
Yes. I had a Palm Treo for years, a Palm Tungsten and III before that, was buying and reading eBooks online back around 1999 - I bought Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet" in 2000 just for kicks - so when the iPhone came out I was "so, now the iPod has finally caught up with the rest of the PDA/smartphone world? About time! By the way, when is Palm going to release a new device?"
But for the media it was all "STEVE JOBES INVENTS SUPER MOBILE INTERTUBES THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!!!"
The iPhone's a nice successor to a category created by others, and it stepped neatly into a niche left wide open by Palm's utter self-disintegration and Microsoft's inexplicable inability to carry through on their temporary lead in the phone space - but it's not the total revolution the tech-unsavvy public seemed (and still seem) to think it was.