Objections To The Chinese Room Argument

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.

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 are numerous objections to the chinese room argument by various authors. According to searle s original presentation the argument is based on two key claims. 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.

The chinese room argument is a thought experiment of john searle 1980a and associated 1984 derivation. 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. Gardiner addresses the chinese room argument in his book the mind s new science 1985 171 177. He calls his argument the chinese room argument note.

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. The word understand has been unduly stretched in the case of the chinese room 175. Each objection is named and has a subsection of the paper dedicated to it. Many of these arguments are similar in nature.

There are two main problems with this posing of the argument. The chinese room argument proves nothi ng about a life. He calls each objection a reply. There is a room.

In the following i will present the most commonly presented ones including answers to these objections by searle himself. However several concepts developed by computer scientists are essential to understanding the argument including symbol processing turing machines. Searle objections worksheet the chinese room argument. There may indeed be powerful philosophical objections to the th esis of strong a life but the chinese room argument is not among them.

Replies to the chinese room argument. Searle asks you to imagine the following scenario. Searle actually believes that his argument works against non classical computers as well but it is best to start with the digital computers with which we are all most familiar the chinese room.