Posts tagged #Chinese room
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The Chinese room opens: intelligence, understanding and consciousness, between language and anthropocentrism
Intelligence, understanding and consciousness are three different questions, with three different standards of proof: the first is answered by measuring behaviour, the second by looking inside the system, the third has no answer today, and one can say precisely why. The path runs from Turing to Searle to Chalmers and reaches the new fact: the Chinese room has actually been built, it is a language model (LLM), and the tools of interpretability are beginning to open it, finding representations of the world built from text alone and written in categories that are not ours. Language runs through the whole picture: it describes reality as humans see it, translating our senses and the representation evolution granted us; a system trained on text therefore starts from an anthropocentric description of the world (perhaps an intermediate stage, until senses different from ours exist) and inside that description builds categories that may not be anthropocentric. In the middle, a test anyone can replicate on an ordinary computer with a half-billion-parameter model: the jagged profile of its abilities, its mechanical explanation, the distance between the system's scale of difficulty and ours.