Objections To The Chinese Room Argument

He calls each objection a reply.

Objections to the chinese room argument.

However several concepts developed by computer scientists are essential to understanding the argument including symbol processing turing machines. 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. He calls his argument the chinese room argument note. The word understand has been unduly stretched in the case of the chinese room 175.

Gardiner considers all the standard replies to the chinese room argument and concludes that searle is correct about the room. After searle has presented his argument he structures the rest of his paper as a collection of responses to potential objections. There are two main problems with this posing of the argument. 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.

In the following i will present the most commonly presented ones including answers to these objections by searle himself. Searle asks you to imagine the following scenario. Philosopher john searle goes through the chinese room argument to prove that no matter how powerful computers are they aren t minds. There is a room.

Searle objections worksheet the chinese room argument. Each objection is named and has a subsection of the paper dedicated to it. 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.

Many of these arguments are similar in nature. Gardiner addresses the chinese room argument in his book the mind s new science 1985 171 177. According to searle s original presentation the argument is based on two key claims. There may indeed be powerful philosophical objections to the th esis of strong a life but the chinese room argument is not among them.

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. 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. Replies to the chinese room argument.