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0 pointsjeremyjh25d ago0 comments

It’s an incoherent argument, or a meaningless semantic distinction.

There is no design of such a machine that does not encode a very deep understanding of the game.

Leela Chess Zero does understand chess. She plays at roughly 2300 strength with a search depth of 1 ply - purely on the strength of her gestalt evaluation of the position. Humans have learned a lot about chess from studying her (and AlphaZero’s) games. General, transferable knowledge she developed herself about - for example - the long term value of early rook pawn advances.

“Understanding” doesn’t imply anything about personhood or self reflection or awareness.

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slopinthebag25d ago

It's not, and unfortunately you cannot just dismiss perhaps the greatest refutation of functionalism as being incoherent, you have to actually address the argument.

Take a person (Fred) with no experience of knowledge of chess. They don't know how the game works, how the pieces move, or any of the rules. They memorise an algorithm, say how Leela does its search and evaluation, and they can then look at a position on a board, run the calculations, and come up with a move. Fred can now play chess really strongly, and simultaneously has no understanding of chess. Now in the original experiment it was a room with a person, and the person used a book to reply in Chinese. But the same idea applies.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

jeremyjhOP25d ago

There is no algorithm that can be memorized. Leela's understanding is in the weights, not neural net algorithms.

I'm familiar with the Chinese room argument and I've never accepted it because what it describes isn't real. It imagines some algorithm for which there is no evidence. Show me this process running and then ask me if it understands Chinese.

To me this is as philosophically dubious as the notion of p-zombies.

slopinthebag25d ago

You can actually do calculations of LLMs and models like Leela on paper or in your head if you had enough time (and patience)! It's basically just a whole lotta matrix multiplication. It's a thought experiment and its validity does not rest on the ability for someone to actually do these calculations in a suitable timespan. The specifics of the algorithm have no relevance.

If you did see the process running, when asked would you say it understands Chinese?

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slopinthebag25d ago

It's not, and unfortunately you cannot just dismiss perhaps the greatest refutation of functionalism as being incoherent, you have to actually address the argument.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

jeremyjhOP25d ago

There is no algorithm that can be memorized. Leela's understanding is in the weights, not neural net algorithms.

To me this is as philosophically dubious as the notion of p-zombies.

slopinthebag25d ago

If you did see the process running, when asked would you say it understands Chinese?

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