[Serious] Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Is ChatGPT a Chinese Room? By that I mean is it a digital process that has reduced semantic content to a set of syntactic rules just as in Searle's famous thought problem? If so, does it suggest that semantic content can be fully reduced to syntax?

[Angrboda]

I haven't bothered to learn how ChatGPT works. If it's like a lot of machine intelligence, the exact mechanism is largely opaque to inspection. If that's the case, I don't see fertile ground here. Can you link to some info?

[Anomalocaris]

chatGPT only qualifies as a chinese room because some humans are so marginal that anything sound intelligent and human like to them.

[Silver]

Developer: OpenAI, OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Developer: OpenAI, OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

That's nothing to do with it. The Chinese Room Argument makes the case that if, for example, a computer programmed with Chinese characters responds to questions so well that any speaker of Chinese would assume that they were talking to a real person (passing the Turing test), that person would not be able to tell if the computer actually understands Chinese, or is merely simulating understanding Chinese. If you were locked in a room with a copy of the AI program, and questions written in Chinese were passed to you under the door, you could use the program to print our your responses in Chinese without understanding Chinese. Same with a computer.

Boru

[The Architect Of Fate]

No

[Silver]

If it's a computer, it can only be a simulated response. The computer, after all, isn't sentient.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

If it's a computer, it can only be a simulated response. The computer, after all, isn't sentient.

That's the whole point of the argument for weak AI - with a sufficiently nimble computer, you couldn't tell if it was sentient or not.

Boru

[vulcanlogician]

That's a really good question, Neo. Among physicalist theories, you have two ways to go. Functionalism or biological naturalism. And each answers your question differently.

A functionalist says yes, the AI must be sentient. Because, to the functionalist, consciousness is reducible to the information feedback thing that happens in both brains and neural nets. And such a thing happens in both human brains and AI.

But a biological naturalist thinks that consciousness happens because physically extant neurons fire. The information element has little to do with it. When physical neurons fire, Consciousness happens because of certain natural events. That's what the biological naturalist thinks.

If you take the chinese room to be conscious, you're a functionalist. 

Otherwise, you must accept a different metaphysics. That it takes the physical happening of x to say that consciousness happens. (ie. biological naturalism.)

[Anomalocaris]

It seems to me that for the Chinese room scenario to have any depth beyond the trivial “the ignorant and inattentive fool can be easily fooled”, then it must assume the answer, which is it is possible for a non-sentient computer to be programmed so as to respond to any depth of probing questions from a sentiment person with any possible depth of knowledge of how human sentience works in a way such that computer’s non-sentience is impenetrable to the said person.

There is no way we could possibly know whether that is true or not.