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What Understanding Actually Is

  1. 01What Understanding Actually Is
  2. 02Back to the feeling
  3. 03The Chinese Room
  4. 04What Searle was saying
  5. 05Memory card
  6. 06The systems reply
  7. 07The Searlese Room
  8. 08It cuts both ways
  9. 09No right answer
  10. 10What humans actually do
  11. 11Does it understand?
  12. 12The line keeps moving
  13. 13Two kinds of intelligence
  14. 14The question Turing left us
  15. 15Reinforce your understanding
  16. 16Question: Chinese Room
  17. 17Question: The systems reply
  18. 18Question: Narrow vs general
  19. 19Quiz: answer
  20. 20Still open
  21. 21Want to go deeper?
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What Searle was saying

A computer program is like the person in the room.

The program receives inputs (). It applies rules (its code). It produces outputs (more symbols). At no point does it understand what any of those symbols mean.

The program might pass the . It might fool every judge who tries it. Searle says: so what?

The person in the room fooled everyone outside, and understood nothing.

Searle called this the line between syntax and semantics. Syntax is the shape and arrangement of symbols. Semantics is their meaning. Computers, he argued, can only manipulate syntax. True meaning? That's something else entirely.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. plato.stanford.edu
  2. 2. web-archive.southampton.ac.uk