catching up with myself

I thoroughly enjoyed teaching my stress management and meditation class tonight. Partly it has to be the feedback from the group. Somebody said she felt at peace in her body, and more freedom than she had ever experienced before. Another part is the preparation. I love preparing the meditations, it puts me in such a peaceful state of mind.

In other areas of life I am learning that a car really saves no time at all. I miss self-propulsion, whether on foot or bike, and use the extra freedom to browse online dating sites instead of writing my dissertation or catching up with work. I think I will try returning the car tomorrow. This is a reversible step, if I get too tired walking with my brace I can always rent another car.

I have been feeling rather argumentative, and wrote this philosophical rant:

TURNING SEARLE’S CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT ON ITS HEAD

The Turing Test is a test of artificial intelligence. According to the test, if a human interlocutor cannot correctly discriminate between the answers of a human respondent and an artificial one, say a robot, computer, or software, then the artificial simulation can be considered intelligent. Searle presents the following argument to counter the Turing Test. Imagine a room with a set of instructions in English. Notes are passed into the room in Chinese, and the inhabitant of the room, who is an English speaker, looks up the answer in the instruction manual and returns another note in Chinese. He could easily pass the Turing Test, and yet does not understand a single word of Chinese. Of course, this is only a refutation of the Turing Test if we equate intelligence with understanding. But let’s move on.

Assuming the Chinese Room Argument is true, does my brain understand English? My brain only deals in nerve impulses and neuro-chemical signals. These are not in English. Therefore one can conclude that no part of my brain, nor the whole, understands English, any more than the inhabitant of Searle’s Chinese Room understands Chinese.

So what exactly understands English? Rejecting some sort of immaterial soul, I would say that I lie at the intersection between my brain, which speaks in impulses and chemicals, and the culture of which I am a part that contains the English language. We could illustrate this using the Chinese Room. The person outside the room, as well as the person who wrote the instruction manual, both understand Chinese. They are communicating via the English-speaking messenger. Similarly, I am communicating with other I’s in English via brains that speak in impulses and chemicals. Where do the I’s come from? We have no evidence that they can come into existence without brains, or some other physical manifestation. And they stop creating new thoughts once their brain dies. And yet, language is something that arguably can only exist between two or more people, so it cannot be tied to a single body. There can be no understanding of Chinese (or English) without being part of a social group. We are social animals, and our brains thirst to communicate with others as soon as or even before we are born, so that when we are born into a language culture we quickly become ‘I’s.

Can a computer have the experience of being an I? Perhaps only if it were designed to be really social.

I noticed this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes on the wall of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law:
"When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mighter than she who once wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures ofthe ever-lengthening past - figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life."