Forum.RttP{This is relevant}

Ronald Andruchuk
Tomoji Shogenji
Short paper 8
Nov 23, 2009
The point of the Chinese room argument is to argue against strong AI. Strong AI suggests that a properly functioning computer program with the right inputs and outputs would thus have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have a mind. There is a question of whether a computer program that passes the Turing Test may not be thinking.
We are asked to imagine a setting in a room in which we are asked to imagine you meaning I or someone else who may only understand English can be in this room. We then receive a sequence of Chinese characters from the outside. You have no idea what these Chinese characters mean but you are given a manual which gives instruction about what Chinese characters you give in response to what sequence of characters that follow. The manual is written in English so that way you can use it because you don’t understand Chinese characters that are mentioned in the manual. This manual will help show you how you can respond in the correct manor to any sequence of Chinese characters without understanding any Chinese whatsoever. This is done without assigning any meaning to them at all. It has been decided that if you can respond to the questions quickly enough by memorizing the manual you can now pass the Chinese Turing test. This is how the argument flows. Now I will explain Searles belief about this idea. He says that it is true that computers are doing what you can now do in the Chinese Room. However, you are just responding to input that you do not even understand. Therefore the computer is not thinking at all. It is stated that we have the intuitive response that the computer has no genuine understanding of the input. To prove this point syntax and semantics are reviewed as evidence. In brief, the Rules of syntax are rules that directly govern symbols. These rules of syntax tell what combinations of symbols are allowed as proper expressions such as with the use of grammar. The rules of syntax tell what types of expressions we can derive from what types of expressions. As far as semantics is concerned the rules are designed for assigning certain values to expressions and they tell us the way these values are to be handled.
So Searles thinks the person in the Chinese room relies on the syntactic rules only as he responds to the Chinese questions that he truly does not understand. Searles says there is no meaning assigned since there is no understanding of the Chinese language from this individual. All in all, Searles sees thinking and intelligence as something that requires more than the mastering of syntactic rules. He believes thinking is only thinking when meaning is applied to the symbols. Searles believes a computer processes symbols according to the program without assigning any meaning at all to the symbols. Thus resulting in his belief of why computers absolutely do not think.
For 1 extra point I will discuss a counter argument not discussed in class.
According to the SEP, there is an argument called the OTHER MINDS REPLY in response to the Chinese Room argument. The main question in the reply is the question of how do you know that other people understand Chinese or anything else? To answer this we see we need to understand the behavior involved in this situation. It is expressed that the computer can pass behavioral tests so if you are going to attribute cognition to other people you must in principle also attribute it to computers. Searles reply to this is that we presuppose that other people have minds just like in physics as we presuppose the existence of objects. He follows this statement by saying, “critics hold that if the evidence we have that humans understand is the same as the evidence we might have that a visiting alien understands, which is the same as the evidence that a robot understands, the presuppositions we may make in the case of our own species are not relevant, for presuppositions are sometimes false. For similar reasons, Turing, in proposing the Turing Test, is specifically worried about our presuppositions and chauvinism. If the reasons for the presuppositions regarding humans are pragmatic, in that they enable us to predict the behavior of humans and to interact effectively with them, perhaps the presupposition could apply equally to the computer.” Basically I feel that Searle is just using the same point as before and that all computers are just reading and processing syntax. This is his response to try to falsify all other arguments against his point of view.