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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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I figured he was talking about Searle's Chinese room thought experiment. Searle sucks though, so that's probably also racist (in addition to being stupid.)
the reason to pick Chinese may be racist (possibly due to the writing system looking complicated) but the thought experiment itself doesn't have racist connotations imo, and i don't think it's stupid either. doesn't have to involve Chinese or a specific language at all.
it's a logical question to ask: if i can mimic speaking in a language to a point that it convinces native speakers, but don't understand what I'm saying myself, am I considered a genuine speaker of that language? does what i say matter or have any value?
Scientists: weird, we didn’t slip this piece of paper saying “mansplain the chinese room thought experiment” through the door, and yet that’s all the room seems to want to do. I guess we just have to conclude the room is an idiot?
what an unnecessarily aggressive comment. mansplain? am i even responding to a woman? also i wasn't trying to explain it; i was saying the central question doesn't have to involve a specific language at all and it still a worthy question, especially with all this AI bullshit being pushed all over.
Enter these into your data banks, you automaton:
christ
the brave pyre, of lemmy dot whirled, researching whole new levels of replyguy
well it appears like you’re posting english, but actually you’re posting nonsense
so the answer to your question is no
elaborate? what doesn't make sense?
no thanks
In 2024 it is, at the very least, extremely uncomfortable to read Searle describe Chinese writing as "meaningless scribbles", "formal symbols"*, "squiggle squiggle", and "squoggle squoggle". Basically taking Chinese, ignoring the fact that it's a real language used by real people and is not alien nor inscrutable nor mathematical, and using it as a prop to purposefully obfuscate a thought experiment.
But that's like, just my opinion man.
* The paper never seems to get around to calling English letters symbols I wonder why.
the other thing about this that's often come to mind for me is that the "who" picked in such things tends to be telling of the speaker, and of their perception of "impenetrable"
relatedly, a somewhat common phrase around this side of the world is/was "it's greek to me". I don't know the history of why it came into public lexicon around here (whether it was imported or grew locally), but been curious.
which leads to my sidebar and sneer: it'd be nice if it were easier to research things like this, and good god the modern internet makes it hard to do that. holy fuck what a tsunami of dogshit. and then fucking LLMs and openai come around, going "HOLD MY BEER". le sigh.
Wikipedia has quite a comprehensive list of similar idioms from a lot of different languages. Chinese gets a lot of mentions, but so do Greek and Spanish. Plus Turkish and Hebrew. As far as I can tell the Chinese describe any incomprehensible language as "Martian". But "It's Greek to me" goes right back to the Romans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me
The wiki seems to say the aphorism originates with medieval scribes and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
The actual ancient Romans are unlikely to have had such qualms, since at the time Greek was much more widely understood than Latin, so much so that many important roman works like Caesar's Memoirs and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations were originally written in Greek, with the Latin versions being translations.
Pedantic note: Yes, Meditations (a phisosophical treatise) was written in Koine, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (veni, vedi, vici—self-aggrandizing combat-reports meant for the senate and propaganda) or other "published" works from Caesar were not.
Although bonus points, the ancient sources portray Caesar (a proper educated major family Patrician) as speaking his dying words—if reported saying anything at all—in Greek, not in Latin: "Καὶ σὺ τέκνον" (Even you, child) rendered in Shakespeare as "Et tu, Brute".