God forbade...must reading!

Chinese room






  The Chinese Room is a thought experiment by John Searle which first appeared in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980.



   In the artificial intelligence experiment, Searle imagines himself in a room acting as a computer by manually executing a program that convincingly simulates the behavior of a native Chinese speaker. People outside the room slide Chinese characters under the door and Searle, to whom "Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles", is able to create sensible replies, in Chinese, by following the instructions of the program; that is, by moving papers around.



  The experiment is the centerpiece of Searle's Chinese room argument which holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave.



   He concludes that "programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds."

           "I can have any formal computer program you like, but I still understand nothing."


  The Chinese room is an argument against certain claims of leading thinkers in the field of artificial intelligence.



   Searle argues that without "understanding", we cannot describe what the machine is doing as "thinking". Because it does not think, it does not have a "mind" in anything like the normal sense of the word.



  Although the Chinese room argument was originally presented in reaction to the statements of AI researchers, philosophers have come to view it as an important part of the philosophy of mind.



   "The Chinese room argument ... assumes complete success on the part of artificial intelligence in simulating human cognition," Searle writes. This leaves open the possibility that a machine could be built that acts more intelligent than a man, but does not have a mind or intentionality in the same way that brains do.



  "The study of the mind starts with the facts that humans have beliefs, while thermostats, telephones, and adding machines don't ... what we wanted to know is what distinguishes the mind from alarm clocks and livers."


Brains must have something that causes a mind to exist.

 
   John Haugeland wrote that "AI wants only the genuine article: machines with minds, in the full and literal sense. This is not science fiction, but real science, based on a theoretical conception as deep as it is daring: namely, we are, at root, computers ourselves!"

 
 
Wikipedia