The Argument Of The Chinese Room ( CR )

As scientists continue to their research, fundamental questions about intelligence are brought to the surface.

“ All our civilization is based on invention; before invention, men lived on fruits and nuts and pine cone and slept in caves “ - Reginald Fessenden. All major civilizations have a significant influence on mankind and the different inventions the civilizations produced. Although, it is evident that the Chinese Civilization has the greatest impact on the development of man out of all of the civilizations due to the innovation of gunpowder, and the discovery of the silk road.

“I used to worry that computers would become so powerful and sophisticated as to take the place of the human minds,” expresses Lewis Thomas, the author of “The Corner of the Eye” [Thomas, 83]. A large part of Thomas’s fear of computers is due to the fact that “a large enough machine can do all sorts of intelligent things beyond our capacities” [Thomas, 83]. However, computers cannot replace us; he realizes computers cannot do some of the things that we can do, like being human. We like to be equivocal, imaginative, and self-conscious. Computers are the complete opposite of the traits that define us as human; or as Thomas states it, “they are not designed, as we are, for ambiguity” [Thomas, 83]. As witnessed by history, the present, and soon the future, it would be self-evident truth that computers will not take over us or be “us”.

“…it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (224). With this thought, Nicholas Carr ends his 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Here, he attempts to convince readers that ultimately, technology has the power to be our cognitive undoing as humans. Carr’s arguments towards this idea and whether or not they are convincing and thorough will be explored. While some may consider the information he provides to be unconnected, I find each of the topics he covers to be powerful in his argument that technology can be a dangerous tool in humanity’s progress towards a higher intelligence.

While technology is commonly thought of as inventions and gadgets, anything that humans have developed for specific purposes or to accomplish certain goals, such as methods or models, must also be correctly categorized as such. In Cathy Davidson’s essay “Project Classroom Makeover,” she discusses a few unconventional forms of technology such as the educational classroom paradigm and standardization. Similarly, in Steve Johnson’s essay “The Myth of the Ant Queen,” he presents procedural technology, such as self-organizing systems, and conceptual technology, collaborative intelligence. He then utilizes another conceptual form of technology, the complexity theory, to interpret these systems’ seemingly uncoordinated patterns. Sherry Turkle branches off of Davidson and Johnson’s ideas by discussing the consequences of questioning what makes a robot alive in her essay “Alone Together.” This narrative highlights the technology’s effect on humans and the reality of robots either improving or diminishing an individual’s quality of life. Besides the slight apprehension of its future usage, humans are mesmerized by the promising potential technology presents. Additionally, structural or paradigmatic technology is deeply intertwined and inherent within society’s functioning, making it impossible to separate technology from human existence.

John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument John Searle is an American Philosopher, born July 31, 1932. He is known for a widely spread argument in Philosophy called the “Chinese Room Argument”. He published his work onto paper in 1980. The argument follows that: “Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he produces appropriate strings of Chinese characters that fool those outside into thinking there is a Chinese speaker in the room.”

The Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, collected and put into text by Chinese scholar Pu Songling, is a collection of tales of mostly alchemic, supernatural, and paranormal nature. One of the common threads that runs through the collection is that of the sexual encounters and sexual relations between people, people and creatures, and people and supernatural beings. These stories deal with the subject of sexual indulgence, and clearly connote sex as a negative and dangerous aspect of human desires. Stir-Fry, the last story in Strange Tales, however, forcefully deviates from that trend of the perception of sexual desire. In Stir-Fry, Pu glides over the topic of the dildo and treats it as if it were just any normal other object that would be ridiculous to cook and serve guests at dinner. A scholar’s sexual desires are no less strange than the tales of sex in stories such as “The Fornicating Dog,” “The Painted Skin,” “Snake Island,” and especially “Lotus Fragrance.” The sexual nature of the toy Pu ignores completely, and he enforces the idea that sexual desires or encounters are not as strange or taboo as Pu himself makes them out to be in his earlier stories in the Strange Tales collection.

Given this situation, one should ask: How can Searle respond if he does not understand the Chinese language? Do manuals know Chinese? Can the whole room system (dictionaries, Searle and their answers) be considered as a system that understands Chinese?

An all-knowing, self-correcting machine may be beneficial, but the perils of such a powerful piece of technology are also exposed in Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question”. Though vastly more advanced, the AC in “The Last Question” can still be paralleled with our current technology. Technology may have informational benefits, but reliance on technology can cause a negative impact on thinking. Technology can allow us to connect with each other, but unification can be detrimental to individuality. Efficiency is increased with technology, yet being too effective can become catastrophic. As technology becomes more and more advanced, especially to the point of AC, it could achieve sentience and pose a threat to humanity.

In what follows, I will argue why I disagree with Allen’s reasoning. I will also give my account on why I believe, it is not possible to create such a system that can adequately understand on its own. From my understanding of the Chinese Room Argument, John Searle uses an example of individuals and the Chinese language to undermine the Turing Test. The Turing Test states that two systems have the same intermediary causal program, if their input

Christopher says “… I didn’t understand about other people having minds” (116). Christopher does not understand that other people have their own thoughts. He starts to compare the human mind to a computers; It’s like computers. People think computers are different from people because they don’t have minds, even though, in the turning test, computers can have conversations with people about the weather and the wine and what Italy is like, and they can even tell Jokes.

Nonetheless, French (2012) argues that the time has come to re-examine the abandonment of the idea that a machine programmed could pass the Turing test with unconditional accomplishments. Namely, new discoveries in intellectual cognitive science that have demonstrated that human intelligence is fundamentally linked to the embodied experience suggest that computers cannot imitate human intelligence in those aspects in which it is momentously dependent of the sensory experience of the world. Due to these discoveries, scientists abandoned the idea that computers would be able to fully emulate human behavior. However, as French (2012) suggests advances in information technology have brought about software that can collect and retrieve virtually all data that is presented about human experience on the internet. He cites a recent experiment in which a home camera system filmed the first 2 years of one baby’s life the entire time (French 2012). The data used to teach the computer about those aspects of human cognition as well thus facilitating it effusively to pass the Turing test. What remains is to ask whether a computer that could do that is in any imperative aspect different from a human (French 2012). French (2012) seems to be suggesting that passing this full version of Turing test

Pertaining artificial intelligence the works AI, Searle’s Chinese room, and Turing’s paper, all provide different stances of the topic. David, a mecha child, is possibly one of the most human robots ever created, therefore a question arises, is David actually human? Throughout these three works that question can be answered further in depth. The film, AI, takes place where the greenhouse gases have caused the ice caps to melt, flooding coastal cities.

The assumption is that the person is capable of understanding Chinese, simply because he can manage to assemble a set of answers to questions that would be indistiquishable from a person who speaks Chinese. The problem is that the person in the room does not understand any of the answers, but is simply following instructions. Searle utilizes a system’s ability to pass the Turing test as a parameter in the study, though the person would still indeed not understand Chinese. Searle proceeds to refute the claims of strong AI one at a time, by positioning himself as the one who manipulates the Chinese symbols. The first claim is that a system, which can pass the Turing test, understands the input and output. Searle replies that as the "computer" in the Chinese room, he gains no understanding of Chinese by simply manipulating the symbols according to the formal program, in this case being the complex rules. (Searle, 1980) It was not necessary for the operator to have any understanding of what the interviewer is asking, or the replies that produced. He may not even know that there is a question and answer session going on outside the room.

* Developments in computer science would lead to parallels being drawn between human thought and the computational functionality of computers, opening entirely new areas of psychological thought. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon spent years developing the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and later worked with cognitive psychologists regarding the implications of AI. The effective result was more of a framework conceptualization of mental functions with