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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 humans actually do

Here's something worth sitting with: we don't fully understand our own understanding.

When you recognize a face, you can't explain how. It happens below the level you can watch. When you get a joke, you can't trace the steps from words to laughter. When you know a sentence is wrong before you can say why, something's working that you can't see.

Yet we hold machines to a standard we can't meet ourselves.

That doesn't settle the debate. But it does show "understanding" isn't as sharp a line as it feels when we're drawing it between humans and machines.

Did you know?

In 1966 the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi put this in one line: "We know more than we can tell."
You can pick your friend's face out of a crowd in an instant, yet nobody could write down the rules for how you did it. The knowing runs deeper than anything you can say.
Citations(3)↓
  1. 1. web-archive.southampton.ac.uk
  2. 2. plato.stanford.edu
  3. 3. en.wikipedia.org