Full Blog – Chinese Room

Comments
Zachary Henkel - http://zmhenkel-chi2010.blogspot.com/2011/01/chinese-room-blog.html
Miguel Alex Cardenas - http://alex-chi.blogspot.com/2011/01/chinese-room.html

Reference Information
Title: Minds, Brains, and Programs
Author: John R. Searle
Presentation Venue: Behavioral and Brain Sciences; Cambridge University Press; 1980

Summary
In this paper, John Searle sets out to debunk the idea that a computer can understand if it can simulate a conversation. The example Searle describes in the paper describes a machine that can hear a story and make inferences about the story, a work done by Roger Schank and his colleagues at Yale. Searle uses the Chinese Room argument to challenge Schank’s claims.

Searle describes the following scene: He is locked in a room and given a stack of pages with Chinese writing. He doesn’t know any Chinese. He is then given another stack of pages of Chinese script and a set of rules written in English that correlate to the first stack of Chinese pages. Searle can do what the computer does and, in essence, show that he understands Chinese.

Searle argues that formal symbol manipulations do not show any true kind of understanding. He goes on to discus several replies he received from people in the field in regards to his Chinese Room argument.

The author concludes by saying that only true machines, not programs, can truly think. Since the machine cannot truly understand, it cannot truly be thinking when it takes in a story as input and outputs answers about the story.

Discussion
While the paper was interesting, it was also incredibly long. Searle had a casual way of writing – almost as if he was speaking to a friend – that held my interest for a while, but later tended to confuse me. I attribute some of my zoning out to the length of the paper. Searle does go into great depth in making his argument clear, so even with the occasional zoning out, I was able to follow the paper.

It was also surprising to see how some of the researchers responded to Searle’s Chinese Room argument, especially the one who said that even thermostats “can be said to have beliefs.” This earned the researcher a humorous response from Searle that inspired the little picture I have included in this blog entry that my fiance quickly drew for me.