I sometimes reference a computational linguistics factoid that appears to be now lost in the mists of early DoD Tipster program research: Chinese linguists only agree on the segmentation of texts into words about 80% of the time. We can find some qualitative agreement on the problematic nature of the task, but the 80% is widely smeared out among the references that I can now find. It should be no real surprise, though, because even English with white-space tokenization resists easy characterization of words versus phrases: “New York” and “New York City” are almost words in themselves, though just given white-space tokenization are also phrases. Phrases lift out with common and distinct usage, however, and become more than the sum of their parts; it would be ridiculously noisy to match a search for “York” against “New York” because no one in the modern world attaches semantic significance to the “York” part of the phrase. It exists as a whole and the nature of the parts has dissolved against this wholism.

John Searle’s Chinese Room argument came up again today. My son was waxing, as he does, in a discussion about mathematics and order, and suggested a poverty of our considerations of the world as being purely and completely natural. He meant in the sense of “materialism” and “naturalism” meaning that there are no mystical or magical elements to the world in a metaphysical sense. I argued that there may nonetheless be something that is different and indescribable by simple naturalistic calculi: there may be qualia. It led, in turn, to a qualification of what is unique about the human experience and hence on to Searle’s Chinese Room.

And what happens in the Chinese Room?… Read the rest