Searle's Robot

Flying cars, Robots, and weird clothes style that’s what every person thought the future was going to be back in the 60’s, and something that kept those ideas for those times was a cartoon known by The Jetsons, but in this days those ideas are somewhere far from their expectation, but some things came to be real.

Another contradiction appears in chapter 3 “Tools of the Mind”, Carr states “Language itself is not a technology” (51). This is a contradiction to chapter 5 “A Medium Of The Most General Nature”, where the whole concept of the chapter is writing and reading, which is considered language to most. When reading chapter 5 and remembering this quote, it makes the reader question Carr’s credibility of chapter 3 of how language evolves from humans, and that reading and writing is part of our culture and is not a technology.

The team members of S.A.W. all come from different backgrounds, yet they all have a profound interest in very similar things. Dahmin Branch is an eleventh grader who’s involved in sports programs, such as basketball, while also being involved in academic programs, such as the National Honor Society. However, through all of this, he has developed a profound interest in fixing computers and designing video games. This has encouraged him to be a computer engineer and a video game designer five years ago and he is still committed to accomplishing that goal today. Marquise Harris is an eleventh grader who simply loved to tinker with broken technology and play with it when he was a young child. He considers fixing things fun and interesting. When he fixed his old computer, he felt like his fate was sealed.

The documentary Alien of the Deep Sea presented us with six different experiments aimed at studying different aspects of octopuses' intelligence. I will focus on just one of those experiments and attempt to apply Jackendoff's First Fundamental Argument which argues that a language user's mind can be viewed as an internal computational system containing unconscious set of rules.

John Searle first proposed the argument known as The Chinese Room Argument in a book he wrote in 1984. The argument is well known if not famous and has become one of the best-know arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself locked in a room following a computer program for responding to questions written in Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle does not understand Chinese writing, but he can follow the computer program to manipulate symbols and numerals to easily respond to the questions without fully understanding even what he was being asked or responding. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that following instructions and programming a computer might make it seem to understand Chinese but doesn’t have a real

Many animals exhibit unique mating patterns and over time have evolved species specific traits to grab the attention of potential mates. Sexual Selection allows for individuals who possess certain qualities to produce more offspring than others, resulting in the evolution by means of natural selection of that trait and the diminishing of the traits of the weaker individuals. This allows for greater fitness of an individual which will in turn benefit the species as a whole. Male Fiddle crabs possess one large claw, which has been observed to be used as a weapon and as a signal of courtship (Callander et al. 2013). In their study, Callander and her team used a robotic male crab claw to determine whether female fiddler crabs had a preference

The article Is Language the Key to Human Intelligence? , Written by David Premack a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how humans have displayed their intelligence through language, unlike animals whose language, (any) hasn’t evolved at all. Premack uses examples such as grammar and syntax of the human language and explains the uniqueness and evolution of language over time. He claims humans have humans have six symbols system: “two that evolved- the genetic code and spoken language- and four that we invented: written language, Arabic numerals, music notation, and lab notation (a system for coding choreography)”. One word that he puts emphasis time over time is Recursion (“makes it possible for the words

The Chinese room is an experiment by Searle to reject the Turing theory that a machine can be intelligent. He asks if a machine has an intelligent conversation, does it mean it really has the ability to think, and understands what it says? He imagined himself in a room. He has a book can instruct him to get the meaning of Chinese questions, and answer them correctly. If a Chinese speaker outside the room asks a question (All Chinese language), Searle can find the answer from the book and respond it. His point is that although he knows nothing about Chinese language, he can answer all the questions in a manner that it seems he knows Chinese language. The point of Searle’s Chinese room argument is that a machine can easily pass the test if it is programmed. The test shows that even if the computer answers all the questions fast and correct, does not mean it can think the same as we

“The traditional view of language is that words are vehicles for moving ideas from one head to another”. However, the alternate view given is expressed in a book written by Skinner called “Verbal Behavior”. Skinner states that in order to understand the nature

According to The Theory of Western Thought, “The best known rhetorical device developed in The Meaning of Meaning is perhaps the ‘semantic triangle’” (Golden, Berquist, Coleman, Sproule, 2010, pg. 265). Ogden and Richards determined that people generally see words as “things in reality” therefore “we confuse the symbol or word with the ‘thing’ or object in reality’” (Golden, Berquist, Coleman, Sproule, 2010). For example, the word FAN would literally be perpetually twirling propellers to produce wind. Of course, one intellectually understands that the object and the word are not the same thing, however, while humans communicate, as Ogden and Richards argue, we tend to make a “necessary connection” between the word and the reality of the object, which they refer to as the referent (Golden, Berquist, Coleman, Sproule, 2010). Simply put, our experience with a word or object, is parallel to our basic understanding of the object we use the word to refer to.

Psycholinguists are interested in the role of concreteness and imagery in mental processing. The dual coding theory proposes that mental representations are associated with two distinct systems: the verbal system, which deals specifically with language and the non-verbal imagery system, which deals with nonlinguistic objects and events (Clark & Paivio 1991; Harley 2008; Paivio et al. 1988). The two systems are distinct, yet they are interconnected to each other in a way that activation in one system can lead to activation in the other. For example, one can think of the word apple and also visualize the object apple. The dual coding theory holds that concrete language has the ability to activate both the verbal and the visual system, while abstract language activates only the verbal system (Clark & Paivio 1991; Kounios & Holcomb 1994).

The robot had been out for 24 hours now and already Jasper has lost his family from the explosions. All 4 of them were dead except for him. He was alone and the frigid night air had engulfed him in chills as he lay on the hard, burned ground.The robot….the robot was originally a government project. Then the AI nuclear robot went rogue, escaping the facility where the tests were being run and started blowing everything up across Dead Creek, Farem, the capital of the Government.

What Lakoff means by “We use language as much as language uses us,” is that humans use language to express their thoughts and ideas but at the same time language dictates our thoughts and how we interpret reality. Without words it’s extremely hard to express our thoughts and the different form of expressions that come out “can be synonymous in their denotative sense”. (Lakoff ) We tend to believe that we are in control of language, but the inability to find a word that resembles the meaning that the speaker desires clearly shows that language

When we try to imagine the mechanics of our brain and how it works to understand speech, we may first think of the brain on a physiological level. After simple searches on the internet, one may find that speech production can be located in a specific area of the brain. However, when thinking about this topic on a systemic level, we end up with multiple answers to the same question. To answer the question on how we compute mental processes such as speech, there are two systems that have been theorized: Symbolic systems and Connectionism. The goal of this paper is to shed light on both of these systems and at the end, will uncover which system best fits our ability to produce and perceive speech. The idea of symbolic systems is that human cognitive processes consists of symbols, manipulated by some unit that reads those symbols and interprets them for us. There are different approaches to symbolic systems, such as the language of thought and computational theory of mind, both of which will be discussed and dissected later. Connectionist theory offers a more pattern-like way of learning by following rules that help interpret the patterns of language, as well as non-rule-like patterns that languages may contain. We follow these patterns from birth, following models such as the TRACE model. Both systems offer explanations of human cognition and understanding language, but connectionist models gives a better sense of how language is both perceived and produced in our minds

This theory states that “Human cognition is unique in that it has become specialized for dealing simultaneously with language and with non-verbal objects and events. Moreover, the language system is peculiar in that deals directly with linguistic input and output (in the form of speech or writing) while at the same time serving a symbolic function with respect to non-verbal objects, events, and behaviors. Any representational theory must accommodate this dual functionality.”