Chinese Room Argument

When it comes to artificial intelligence, various people have various different views on the topic. Many individuals see the brain is comparable to a computer and the mind is comparable to the software. The belief is an implementation of the right program can create a mind for the computer. Even if it is not yet possible, the possibility is there. The others, including Searle, hold ground on the opposite side. According to Searle, the mind have semantic, thought, and a mental state, whereas a digital computer is merely made up of syntax, or instructions on how to compute. Therefore, by those virtue, Searle is arguing “no computer program by itself is sufficient to give a system a mind” (Searle, p. 683), due to the syntactical nature of a digital …show more content…
Imagine a person with knowledge of English and without any knowledge of Chinese, is put into a room with an instructional book in English on how to manipulate the Chinese characters. The book contains only syntactical instructions, no semantics. Given some symbols the person must pass back Chinese symbols in response to these symbols. Maybe the instructions is so good such that you are unknowingly producing responses that are convincing enough, as though they came from a native Chinese speaker. The point Searle is trying to make with this example is the fact that the person processing symbols is behaving like a computer program; following the syntax without knowing the semantics of its input and output. Therefore, the computer does not have a mind, because it does not have a mental state to understand and think about the semantics of what it is doing. From what I can reason from his arguments, Searle is expressing the idea that a human have a mind and a mental state. Therefore, a human can understand the semantics of the syntax of language if learned, and can think because “thoughts must have a meaning, or... a semantic content.” (Woody Lecture Notes, Oct. 29) Whereas in contrast, the computer running a program defined in syntactical instructions is incapable of having a mind, a mental state, and semantics, because all of those requires something more than syntax. Which follows that a computer …show more content…
I will first concede that a computer cannot have a mind, a mental state, and no understanding of the semantics of any of its input and output. However, I claim that a computer can think despite not having a mind of its own or a mental state of its own. I will accomplish this by showing that when a computer program performs syntactic processing, it is in fact thinking without the awareness of its own thinking. The layout of Searle’s argument for a computer running a program cannot be sufficient for having thought is like so. First, computer programs are defined in purely formal terms. Second, when a digital computer runs a program, it requires only syntax supplied by the program. Third, thoughts are always about something. Fourth, to be about something thoughts must have semantic content. Lastly, semantic content cannot be derived from syntax alone. All of those concludes that a computer running a program cannot be sufficient for having thought. (Woody Lecture Notes, Oct. 29). Let's take the example of computing ‘2+2’ as the syntactic process a computer can run. The first and the second premises are true already in this case; to get to the answer ‘4’, the computer runs the syntactic program to parse, compute, and output the result. I assert premise three and four are true for syntactic process for a reason Searle did not anticipate. When the computer performs its