A.I. Dr. John Searle and Understanding Chinese...

[Rick1234567S]

The philosopher John Searle posited an argument (The Chinese Room Argument) that if he was in a box, and someone passed him Chinese tokens to match up with English words, he could translate or speak Chinese but he would not understand it.

He argued that A.I. will also not understand, because that is all they do.

So then what does it mean to understand? Well that is where you put things in context. So in a flash a wave goes through your long term memories, and it reindexes the information as it is all arranged very quickly normally, but not always. Now some times it takes a good long while to understand something before the lights go on, When I was a kid, in the early grades, the Pythagorean Theorem, puzzled me, and I could not understand this magic.

Then at a point it all made sense. So that is what understanding is. So the amount of processing done there, I assume is quite extensive, because you are making new connections to the data. In the case of languages some people are better at it than others, but the same can be said about math or any subject matter.

It seems hypothetically possible that given enough processing power A.I. could mimic understanding.