Philosophy professor John Searle visits Google to discuss the philosophy of mind and the potential for consciousness in artificial intelligence. John is widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. Among his notable concepts is the "Chinese room" argument, which challenges the supposed language comprehension ability of artificial intelligence. Searle conceived of the “Chinese room” thought experiment in 1980. Imagine a native English speaker who cannot read or speak Chinese, locked in a room with boxes of Chinese symbols together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols. Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese. And imagine that by following the book of instructions, the man in the room can pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions. Thus the person in the room is able to convince the people outside the room that he understands Chinese, but in fact he does not understand a word of Chinese. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a computer may make it appear to understand language, but cannot produce true comprehension. Searle argues the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no true grasp of meaning or semantics. Thus, the theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is inadequate. Instead, the human mind must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes. His argument has large implications for semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of consciousness, computer science and cognitive science generally. Originally published in December of 2015.
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