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So you could put this person in a room with a bunch of native Chinese speakers, and he could hold conversations fluently with all of them. Yet you claim he does
by feoren 20d ago
So you could put this person in a room with a bunch of native Chinese speakers, and he could hold conversations fluently with all of them. Yet you claim he doesn't understand Chinese? How can you possibly defend that? This is very close to "zombie theory" -- everyone else is an automaton except you. Nobody else has real thoughts. That obviously fluent Chinese speaker doesn't really understand Chinese.
- GPerson 16d agoYou actually think using Google translate in conversation means you understand the language. This is your position.
- feoren 14d agoYou've taken the understanding back out of the person's brain again. Remember, the whole experiment is to try to claim that there is no understanding, anywhere. Yes, I actually think Google Translate basically "understands" Chinese, and any human-relational part that it doesn't fully "understand" it is understood by the human using it. The human plus Google Translate contain a full understanding of Chinese (up to the fidelity of Google Translate).
- slopinthebag 20d agoIf the person was told in Chinese to jump in the air, would they be able to follow that instruction? If they actually understood Chinese they would. But since they don’t and they’re just mechanically translating symbols without actually understanding the language conceptually they would not know to jump.
- Jtarii 20d agoWhat's stopping the book from containing that information? When you hear a certain set of symbols in a certain context you jump.
- hackinthebochs 20d agoThis just alters the thought experiment. What the thought experiment offers is a book of opaque rules, just instructions on how to transform symbols into more symbols without any concern for their meaning. What you're offering is a translation dictionary, what does it mean when one encounters X symbol. You're giving him a book on learning Chinese.
- Jtarii 20d agoLanguage is infinitely generative though so I don't understand how you can write down a finite list of rules in a book in the first place. The thought experiment is fundamentally nonsensical.
- hackinthebochs 19d agoIt only takes a finite number of rules to generate a mapping between unbounded strings of finite symbols. The brain doesn't contain an infinite amount of information after all.
- Jtarii 19d agoI don't think the brain encodes language via a giant list of rules.
- slopinthebag 20d ago> What's stopping the book from containing that information? Because in the thought experiment, the translation function (which is what you mean by the book) is f(Chinese) -> Chinese. If you don't have knowledge of Chinese, it won't help you. We can also play a little game. I’ve invented a language called Kejdoke. Me: Jeheixis ownc j’Lm hys bjækf¿ You: Kloften¡’by You should be able to tell me what this exchange was about. Since any reasonable definition of understanding for a language would be to do this, and you have the same knowledge of Kejdoke as the person in the thought experiment has about Chinese. If you can't tell me what this exchange was about, the person in the thought experiment could not understand either.