(I’m putting this to the main page for now, eventually, I’ll move it to the errors and mistakes section)
The Chinese Room thought experiment and the new “Errors and mistakes” section of Philosophy Bear
Recently, quite an embarrassing mistake in something I’d written came to my attention. In describing the Chinese Room thought experiment in Against John Searle, Gary Marcus, the Chinese Room thought experiment and its world, [which I recently reprinted on Lesswrong, hence the link] I took it that one of the stipulations of the experiment is that the person in the room operates by a lookup table. This is actually not part of the original thought experiment, thanks to TAG on Lesswrong for pointing this out. I will be correcting it in a future version
This is actually not the first time I’ve made mistakes regarding the Chinese room thought experiment. In a previous essay, despite theoretically knowing better, I included a claim that the real nub of the Chinese Room Thought experiment is qualia. Honestly, I think this may be partially true regarding the underlying intuition, but that’s a big claim to make baldly.
These mistakes reflect foolishness on my part- I shouldn’t have assumed that my recollections from a first-year Phil of mind course when I was 17 years old were accurate, or that just because I study philosophy my knowledge of relatively basic stuff doesn’t have gaps.
But it also reflects the structure of this project, which is meant to be at once loose and serious and will therefore involve substantial errors from time to time. I can’t do what I do and operate on the level of peer-reviewed work. It’s not that sort of game, unfortunately.
So, for transparency, and to incentivize myself to accuracy, I will be chronicling future serious errors here.