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John Searle's Chinese Room Argument

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John Searle is an American philosopher born in 1932 and attended Oxford University. The Chinese room argument is Searle’s way of refuting the Strong A.I. thought that running an adequately complex program is sufficient for thinking by showing how running a computer program is not sufficient for the computer to be thinking. The argument goes that a person who has never seen the Chinese language in any form is sitting in a room sealed from the outside world. In the room, there is a basket full of Chinese symbols and a book that shows what symbols to put together when responding to a group of symbols on a piece of paper that has been slipped into the room by a Chinese speaker. The man in the room following the instructions can trick the Chinese …show more content…
When I hear Searle’s Chinese room argument I think about what all my teachers use to say about cheating. When you copy peoples’ homework and classwork it looks like you know the subject matter, but when the test comes around you didn’t really learn anything and are most likely to get a low grade. Copying something is not the same as knowing something. To a computer program everything is ones and zeros and depending on the program it can respond by replicating already stored knowledge. A thinking person is capable of newly formed ideas that they just thought up randomly or with effort. A computer can’t go outside its programing. Strong A.I. can and have criticized the Chinese room argument but not easily I would say since usually a critic concedes a part of the argument. No argument I have heard has given me real cause to think if I might change my opinion. The kind of robot or computer systems we have now to me are not capable of thinking. The semantics are very important for the kind of thinking that humans do. Knowing the meaning behind something is very important and I don’t think can be possible until the A.I. technology can advance in the

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