Chinese room

length. For the purpose of this essay, I will first give a quick overview of what materialism is. I will then discuss an objection made by Searle in his “The Chinese Room”. I will then discuss how a materialist might answer this objection. I will conclude with whether or not this answer was satisfactory or not. Materialism is, in essence, the idea that matter is what makes a human being what they are. There is nothing more than matter and physical structures that make us what we are. We are as Bison suggests “thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming Meat. The meat is the whole deal.” Our consciousness emerges out of matter and this consciousness is events among material things. There…

Searle states that syntax itself is neither constitutive of, nor sufficient for, semantic content. Therefore, the computers are not sufficient enough to have a mind because of their purely syntactical form of processing information. Searle argues that his claim is correct by using an argument that he wrote called, “The Chinese Room Argument”. Searle believes that being able to understand information requires having the ability to have consciousness, self awareness and intentionality.This…

states? Descartes says that there are two kinds of elements in the world, bodies and minds. Descartes believes in interactionism which means minds and bodies intermingle with one another. The Chinese Room Argument was introduced by philosopher John Searle. In this experiment He explains an encounter that a human has with a computer that only responds to the Chinese language. The human is not familiar with Chinese, but by following the program he is able to trick the people outside that he is…

place within its mind. When a computer is processing information on route to its end goal it is said to be computing. Computing however is a term sometimes used in the realm of animals as well. In math class the teacher may instruct her students to “compute 5+5=x” and the students, without the aid of technology, may mentally compute the equation. Thinking however is a term that, at the moment, is used strictly when referring to animals, mainly humans. Computing within computers is considered…

Searle’s Chinese Room Argument was first published in 1980 as an experiment where John Searle attempted to prove certain relationships and differences between artificial intelligence and the human brain. I’m going to argue that the explanations for his argument are inconclusive. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument was an experiment where Searle locked himself in a room and was fed slips of paper under the door in three stages. The first stage is called “a script”. In the first stage John is…

The argument in John Searle’s famous “Chinese room” experiment is that understanding or intelligence in general is not the same as teaching a computer symbols, recognition of them, or computations. In this experiment a man is instructed to translate a paper with squiggles by an answer key, through “if, then” statements such as if “squiggle” then “squiggle”. These squiggles are actually Chinese letters. But it is clear that the man does not understand or can even write Chinese, he is just…

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.…

Chinese Room Experiment: • Searle, who has no knowledge of Chinese, is locked in a room with a large batch of Chinese writing (the script). He is given a 2nd batch (the story) and a 3rd batch (the questions) with a set of rules in English. These batches allow him to correlate the symbols to one another in previous sets and give responses back with Chinese symbols (the answers). • Searle argues that just because he answered the questions correctly in Chinese, it does not mean that he understands…

powerful tool but rather a mind that can be said to understand and have cognitive states. To illustrate the flaws in computationalism, Searle devises the thought experiment called the Chinese Room. The thought experiment begins with a monolingual…

He could insist that premise three of his detractors argument was false, that the luminous room argument demonstrated nothing about the nature of light, and that an ongoing research program which investigated the relationship between of both these phenomena was required in order to settle the dispute. In the same manner, a proponent of artificial intelligence would then have only three similar arguments to respond to Searle’s theory. He could argue that Searle is not in a position to insist that…