Thinking about a Thought Experiment - John Ball inside AI
American philosopher, John Searle, published a thought experiment about the difference between the appearance of understanding and actual understanding—the so-called Chinese Room Argument. It was made a long time ago in the 1980s.
We can contrast what we know today in the cognitive sciences to improve its interpretation while trying to channel the late Alan Turing or mind-meld remotely with John Searle.
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The argument applies equally well to today’s AI approach known as large language models (LLMs) that in some respects appears to understand what it is doing due to the responses it makes. Humans tend to anthropomorphize what they experience.
By looking at the Chinese room, Searle makes an important point about natural language understanding (NLU) that has been my area of work for many years now.
