[eouwt]

Searle's Chinese room is one of those things it's obvious most people talk about without ever having bothered to actually read. Searle does not say computers will never think. Early in the paper he even says - obviously machines can think because we are precisely examples of such machines. His point is that maybe it takes a certain kind of processing to yield what we call consciousness, and that may be a subset of the processes that yield outwardly similar behaviour.

[mannykannot]

I have read through the paper two or three times, as well as several other things Searle and others have written about it, and I have it open in front of me now.

In it, Searle argues that no computer program will be able to satisfy the goal he calls 'strong AI', which he defines thus: "according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states."

As far as I recall (and I am not going to read the whole thing again just to check) he does not precisely define 'computer' or 'computer program', but it is clear that his meaning subsumes ordinary usage: a Turing-equivalent digital device, together with any program that can run on it. It is also clear that, given his underlying position being that syntactical manipulation cannot give rise to semantics, he would include, in his definition, actual universal Turing machines, and any other device, digital or not, that, in his view, can only perform syntactical operations.

Therefore, Searle is saying that computers will never think, except in a most pedantic reading of 'computers'. He is, indeed, a materialist, and regards the brain to be a mind-instantiating machine of sorts, but, like Penrose, he thinks its consciousness must depend on something beyond what we have discovered so far.

Personally, I think the argument begs the question in this sense: it is predicated on the assumption that the only thing in the room that could understand anything would be the human operator, but that, in turn, is predicated on the assumption that nothing else about the room could do so. That he is doing this is made very clear in his attempts to rebuff the 'systems reply' and the 'simulator reply'.

[bigDinosaur]

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert, but based on looking this up it seems like the systems reply is fairly convincing a response - Searle's argument seems to be, as others have noted in this thread, kind of at the level of saying the electricity and chemicals don't understand Chinese and then extrapolating it to 'no understanding is present'. How does that not apply to us? Otherwise if that's all he's saying it doesn't seem like a particularly interesting argument, because I'd agree that a chemical doesn't understand Chinese since our understanding isn't generated at the singular chemical or even singular neuron level.

What's your take on this (very rapidly acquired) impression?