Objections To The Chinese Room Argument

Replies to the chinese room argument.

Objections to the chinese room argument.

Gardiner considers all the standard replies to the chinese room argument and concludes that searle is correct about the room. There is a room. Searle poses the chinese room argument to show how ridiculous it is that a man inside a room manipulating what are to him meaningless symbols constitutes consciousnesses. Complexity of such a program.

In the following i will present the most commonly presented ones including answers to these objections by searle himself. The chinese room argument is a thought experiment of john searle 1980a and associated 1984 derivation. However several concepts developed by computer scientists are essential to understanding the argument including symbol processing turing machines. The chinese room argument proves nothi ng about a life.

The chinese room thought experiment appeals to the intuition that mindless mechanisms could not produce understanding however there are three basic flaws of the metaphor with respect to mechanistic models of the brain all of which could apply equally to a computer simulation. After searle has presented his argument he structures the rest of his paper as a collection of responses to potential objections. Searle asks you to imagine the following scenario. He calls his argument the chinese room argument note.

According to searle s original presentation the argument is based on two key claims. It is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence ai that is to claims that computers do or at least can someday might think. Gardiner addresses the chinese room argument in his book the mind s new science 1985 171 177. Searle objections worksheet the chinese room argument.

Many of these arguments are similar in nature. There are two main problems with this posing of the argument. The chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the philosophy of mind and both major computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to their fields. There are numerous objections to the chinese room argument by various authors.

Each objection is named and has a subsection of the paper dedicated to it. There may indeed be powerful philosophical objections to the th esis of strong a life but the chinese room argument is not among them. Philosopher john searle goes through the chinese room argument to prove that no matter how powerful computers are they aren t minds.