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Question: Explain Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment!. What was it suppose to show!?
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So I won't do your homework for you but effectively it is a metaphor against arguments for AI!. Basically AI states something along the lines of "well one day computers will be able to think like people!. So if we simply get better computers and a few more years of practice at it than we will get a computer that can 'think'"!. AI proponents (BTW AI is effectively dead) claimed that all we had to do is figure out the rules for human thought and put it into the computer code!. With people, however, thinking is not rule based!. (Programming is rule based) The criteria for "knowing" is the public sphere or society!. Similarly the things we do are so complex that if we were to try to make a list of rules there would be an infinite regress!. Where one set of rules requires another set of rules and so on to infinity!.

So with the Chinese room the guy translating stuff into Chinese and putting it back does not actually speak the language but simply knows the rules (grammar) and has a massive dictionary!. Similarly a computer could "translate" but this says nothing about knowing a language!. Basically it illustrates that a computer could never "know", "think" or "understand!."

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In a nutshell, Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment demonstrates that Artificial intelligence is effectively impossible!. It's considered a landmark work in the study of artificial intelligence, and while considerable work has gone into disproving it, the argument is still so solid that British Computer Scientist Pay Hayes has quipped that the field of study of cognitive science is the ongoing attempt to prove the chinese room experiment wrong!.

Searle says that the conditions of a human mind can not be accurately be replicated because they require a human brain, with human brain materials and chemicals and input to function!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment goes like this!. Suppose, you have a man who does not understand chinese inside a room!. The only line of communication he has with the outside world are pieces of paper slipped beneath the crack of the door!. These papers have chinese symbols on them, which ask questions in Chinese!. Inside the room, with the man who does not speak Chinese is an algorithm (a recursive repititious computing process like long division) that produces replies to the questions in Chinese!. The people outside the room slipping the questions in have no idea what is going on inside the room with the man who does not speak Chinese!. They simply slip the questions in and get Chinese answers out!. Searle developed this thought experiment in order to clarify our intuitions about strong and weak AI!. Specifically, as you may have noticed, this thought experiment bears a striking resemblance to the Turing Test, in fact it is a special case of the Turing Test, with some of the internal processing filled in!. The man in the room is functioning as a computing machine!. Searle used his thought experiment to show that just because an algorithm or computer agent or whatever, displays intelligence that seems human-like, or in many cases is indistinguishable from a human, it does not necessarily follow that the process involved in producing the human-like response is conscious or possesses sentience!. The people outside of the room with the man and the algorithm cannot infer if there is an entity that actually understands Chinese replying to them or if there is a completely unconscious process that behaves as if it understood Chinese!. In the example, Searle points out that the man computing the algorithm has absolutely no understanding of Chinese as he does his math problem, and he has no idea of the semantics of the question or the answer, he merely has the rules for producing the answer!. This thought experiment has been used to argue that we must have more than just intelligent behavior in order to capture conscious behavior!. Critics of the arguement often claim that just because the human does not understand the Chinese does not mean that the algorithm itself doesn't also!. They explore the possibility that in carrying out the equation, the man who does not speak Chinese is, for lack of a better word, invoking the consciousness of the algorithm!. Many find this route intuitively unpleasant, though current research does little to settle the debate one way or the other!. If you are interested in more of this kind of issue, read Hilary Putnam's, "The Nature of Mental States!." And also, "Troubles with Functionalism," by Ned Block!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

G It actually shows that, unlike what the other answerers wrote, most people who know grammar and vocabulary, don't understand what they are being asked, or what they are answering!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Hey, check this out!.Www@QuestionHome@Com