Upstairs in a Chinese Room

Philosopher John Searle famously wrote against the notion of artificial intelligence describing an imaginary construction called the "Chinese Room", in which a man in the room receives cards with marks on them and, following a list of instructions, makes marks on other cards that he sends back. The marks happen to be grammatical Chinese, such that the Chinese speaker outside the room writing the cards that go into the room judges the sequence of incoming and outgoing cards to be a cogent conversation in Chinese.

Searle's claim, which I disagree with, is that the "Chinese Room" cannot be said to understand Chinese; like the magician, he misdirects your attention to the fellow in the room who is just following the instructions. You're supposed to think of him as a doofus who just reads the instructions and follows them.

The opinion I hold, the "systems reply", is that it's the room as a whole that understands Chinese. Searle's response: OK, let the guy in the room memorize the book of instructions. If he didn't understand Chinese before, he doesn't now... so how can the room as a whole understand Chinese?

While it may not have anything to do with the issue of AI, I would argue that anyone following those instructions will learn Chinese. Searle wants you to think of the instructions as having purely to do with the marks on the cards, but if the output cards are, by hypothesis, judged to be a sensible conversation in Chinese, they can't be just that. If the incoming card says in Chinese "Who won the Super Bowl in 2010?" the instruction book has to say at some point to go find that out; to do otherwise will tip off the Chinese speaker outside. There aren't enough sources of just the information one wants to be able to always get by with "go look at this table on this Chinese language web site and fill in the ideographs you see in the second column of the row that has '2010' in the first column," the kind of ignorance-preserving instructions that Searle wants you to imagine. With enough conversation going on, eventually the harried follower of instructions will realize what the marks mean, and the technical term for that is "learning written Chinese".

Why am I telling you all this? Because it occurred to me, while at some random place looking something up on what even the label "smart phone" is becoming laughably inadequate for, that eventually we're all going to be Chinese rooms, and if I'm right, we're going to learn quite a bit. I look forward to it.

UPDATE: About that title: here you go. (I'll not embed the "video", as the page has links to other songs you will want to hear.) If you're unfamiliar with the amazing music of Laura Nyro, you have a lot of good listening ahead of you.

The column vanishes...

OK, this is weird.

After restoring files, I went to look at the blog... and found that the right hand column had gone missing, aside from the Free Software Foundation link.

I tried creating a new user on my system that would have a freshly-created profile. Same thing. I upgraded to Firefox 3.6. Same thing. I tried a different computer. Ditto. I tried Opera. No change.

The only way I can see my blog in its entirety today is to use Chromium (the Linux version of Google's Chrome browser).

Time to go seek out help from Blogger.

UPDATE: It's something about the FSF link I had in that column--the referenced Javascript file has to have changed somehow. I've let them know about it, and for now, it's gone.

There is, though, a bright side to everything--it motivated me to back up my Firefox profile and restore just the important pieces of it. Now it renders the middle column nice and wide, as Chromium and Opera do.

OK, here goes nothing...

Backing up and doing a clean install of Karmic Koala. That's where my evening is going, but maybe it will clear up the weirdness with SL... and if not, at least I will have moved to ext4. (w00t!)

Dark Whimsy Sunrise

I've been bad.

I had pictures taken of Whimsy in winter, and lots of time to put them up... and I didn't. Part of it was procrastination; I hear that there are classes in how not to procrastinate, and someday I'll take them. Part of it is that this year there's been plenty of RL snow.

So, I was wandering about the now snow-free Whimsy, playing with Windlight, and I found a setting that made it look as if Sweetie had decided to experiment with removing most of the atmosphere over Whimsy. It made for a striking sunrise, and I had to take a picture.

Tell it to the...

Looking at the various announcements of new fashion releases I came across one store on Paris Island. I went there, and it was a lovely store, beautifully landscaped, but something didn't seem right...

...until I googled. The Marine Corps Recruit Depot is on Parris Island, with two "r"s. Never mind.

Avatars United

I signed up for it a while back, and it became another one of umpteen social web sites that I don't keep up with... but now, LL has bought them, and activity there has spiked with that imprimatur.

I hope that they make some improvements--how about a search feature for groups? Also, I hope they don't expect me to use their blog feature. Too many people have already gone to "real life" blog facilities like Blogger and established blogs that have reputations, links, and familiarity. I fear I've been remiss in keeping this blog fed with new material, not to mention Pectoral Virtual Fashion--no way can I do justice to yet another blog.

UPDATE: I was mistaken. There's one search that will find avatars or groups.

How did you start using Ubuntu?

Just Me, Anna has posted about a competition for International Women's Day in which women's essays on how they started using Ubuntu will be posted and votes gathered to determine a prize winner. Also, Jono Bacon will be picking one at random to also receive a prize.

I should say prize package rather than just prize, as they will include a variety of neat Ubuntu and Open Source-related items.

There's also a post on it at the Linuxers blog; do take a look. Even if you also go to Just Me, Anna, the Linuxers article is worth a look for the elegant Ubuntu Women logo and the other articles.

Wear Red Day

Finally, I'm ahead of the game, and not posting about an event after it happens.

I hope that you'll join in National Wear Red Day on February 5th, even if your first life nation isn't the US. I look forward to a day when we think of heart disease, and someday disease in general, the way we think nowadays about smallpox or polio--oh yeah, people got that a long time ago, didn't they? For now, though, heart disease is the number one killer of women. Please help with the fight against it.

Keep "Tips for Linux" and "All Things Linux" Alive

Amidst the various links to blogs from this blog is one to the blog of helios, a blog by a fellow whose passion to bring Open Source computing to disadvantaged youth in central Texas is an inspiration.

I hope you'll make a point of reading the entry "A Monument to Bruno", and consider helping to keep Bruno's simple but effective web site "Tips for Linux" and the "All Things Linux" forum on the air. (And supporting Helios's work, too.)

Darn it, it's happening again...

I'm back to having SL periodically come to a grinding creep, eating all available CPU cycles. Moving it to another screen helps for a little, and then it happens again. Do that enough, and eventually it crashes. Back to the JIRA, and apologies to my friends for dropping out of the grid unexpectedly.

UPDATE: There's a JIRA entry for what I'm seeing, VWR-16750. If you are an SL resident using Linux, please take a look and vote for it if you're having the same difficulty.

UPDATE: This morning it happened and made my system reboot. After that, I fired it up and saved the logging output... and it ran fine far longer than it took to slow down before. So perhaps something other than SL is causing a problem. Excuse me while I beat my virtual head against a virtual wall.

DOUBLE TAKE: Was I awake when I wrote that? "grinding creep" sounds like an obnoxious guy working at a coffeehouse.

Foxbean Laboratories Releases Nadine 1.5

It's now official; Foxbean Laboratories has released version 1.5 of the "Nadine" prim breasts. Details at Pectoral Virtual Fashion.

My first peek into OSGrid

I've retrieved the Hippo Viewer and taken my first steps into OSGrid. It will take some time to de-Ruth myself, but it will be interesting to see what people are doing there.

UPDATE: It will take longer than I thought. Armed with a transcribed list of my avatar shape parameters, I went back to edit my appearance, and found I couldn't change anything. :(

Copper Canyon Dance Club

Minka Pearl has created the Copper Canyon Dance Club on the Isle of Aran sim near her store. It's a beautiful place, all copper (of course) and black and deep brown. Do check it out; photos are nice, but there's nothing like being there.

Firefox 3.6

It will be available today at 9:30 a.m. Linden Time... er, Pacific Standard Time. Read and see/hear about the changes and improvements.

In the past few days, Germany and France have joined the chorus of recommendations that people move away from Internet Explorer. If you haven't, consider making the switch today.

UPDATE: If that's not enough, one day after Microsoft released a patch to a security hole in IE, another one has turned up.

UPDATE: If that's not enough, I just heard Kim Komando, of all people, say on her radio show that if you don't take any of her other security-related advice, dump Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox.

In SL, you can't taste your foot in your mouth

Sigh. I made an inaccurate statement about editing SL objects. Lesson learned; check things out for yourself.

The Return of Miss Jane

I had to go back and try out Nanami's "Miss Jane" again now that Whimsy is once again green and blooming--after a foot or so of snow and horrible cold in RL, it was a joy. Shadows are on, and I wish I remembered the Windlight setting I used.

Hello, Mumbai!

Looking around on Google Analytics, I see that we've been visited by someone from Mumbai. Hello from cold Iowa... right now, the mid-eighties (Fahrenheit) high you're having sounds awfully good.

Sooner than I thought...

nVidia is showing off tablets based on a platform it calls "Tegra 2": ARM Cortez A9 CPU and nVidia graphics. $200-$300 noises are being made. There's already a "smartbook", the Mobinnova Beam, based on such hardware.

I hope somebody's trying to build the SL client for the ARM; I want to be mobile and on the grid!

Prediction Time

It's year's end/beginning, and that means it's prediction time.

I won't hazard predictions, but like art, I know what I like, and I'm hoping that several of those that Gwyneth Llewelyn makes come true.

The shoe dropped

It finally happened. One of the photos I put in the "What the Fug?" flickr group appeared in a What the Fug? blog entry, "Top 10 SL Fashion Disasters of 2009". Prim breasts, according to the author, are the number one disaster of the year, apparently worse than bling, sexualized child avatars, and jeans so shredded as to expose not-normally-exposed areas.

There are several example photos. All show women with varying levels of decolletage (in my case, the neckline only came down to the neck), but with none of the gratuitous nudity, oiled skin, or exposed nipples and areolae of the more usual targets of venom on that sort of web site... so I guess I got the result I was expecting when I first added a couple of photos to the flickr group.