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| Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence | 
 enlarge | Creators: John Preston, Mark Bishop
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $50.00
Buy New: $41.69
You Save: $8.31 (17%)
Buy New/Used from $29.73
Avg. Customer Rating:  (2 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1554837
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 426
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0199252777
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.35
EAN: 9780199252770
ASIN: 0199252777
Publication Date: September 26, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The most famous challenge to computational cognitive science and artificial intelligence is the philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" argument. Searle argued that, although machines can be devised to respond to input with the same output as would a mind, machines--unlike minds--lack understanding of the symbols they process. 19 essays by leading scientists and philosophers assess, renew, and respond to this crucial challenge.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Ignore the previous comments on "trick philosophy" April 24, 2005
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
The Chinese Room Argument (CRA) has nothing to do with the speed of computers or any future developments in artifical intelligence (at least as understood as following from Turing). The CRA is a purely formal argument intended to refute the claim that computers (defined as Turing machines) can think, or can understand, or are minds solely by virtue of their formal description. (This claim is the essence of "computationalism," after Turing's original formulation.) The CRA is that: 1) Syntax is not semantics. 2) The implemented synatactical or formal program of a computer is not sufficient to generate semantics. 3) Minds have semantics. 4) Therefore, computers (so defined) are not minds/cannot think/do not understand because they are not sufficient to generate semantics.
For example, the concepts we employ to think and the words we use to speak have meanings. But there is nothing in computationalism as syntax that has any meaning whatsoever. Whatever meaning an implemented formal program has results from its being programmed or interpreted by us. Syntax (e.g., a computer program) has no causal powers. Whatever causal powers computers have (e.g., to fly airplanes) results from our programming and our assigning interpretations to the electrical charge insides a chip, not from the program in itself.
The chapters in Views Into the Chinese Room attack different aspects of the CRA. But they address it as an argument that stands or falls on the truth of the premises and the validity of the inference, not on engineering questions such as the speed of computers, which are irrelevant. Searle believes that there are, in fact, thinking machines -- we human beings are biological machines that think. And he believes that there also could be artificially made machines that think. The CRA is meant to show only that an implemented computer program by itself cannot generate mental content or semantic content.
For a clear explanation of the CRA, see chapter 15 of this book, by Stevan Harnad, the editor of The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, where Searle's original paper appeared twenty years ago. Do not rely on reviewers who do not understand the argument in the first place.
 Trick philosophy July 13, 2004
1 out of 21 found this review helpful
The human brain evolved to assist the survival of its owner while the owner navigated the dangerous jungles and forests of ancient times. Its ability to extract patterns from the information provided by the retina and optic nerve is quite phenomenal. The process by which your brain is recognizing my words and understanding my meaning is astounding. Yet if you are asked to act like a computer by reading numbers, moving paper tape, erasing things and following instructions given on the paper tape, you will prove to be one of the slowest computers in the world. The original word `computer' referred to a man sitting in a room with paper, pencil and eraser. These human `computers' were replaced by machines a long time ago because they are too slow. In summary, humans are fast and intelligent at being humans but slow at being computers. In the Chinese Room Argument, John Searle states that although we have a human mind which could otherwise be used to understand Chinese, this particular human mind does not in fact understand it. Given this stipulation, the human mind's ability to process language cannot be used and the only method of "understanding Chinese" is left to the "Chinese room" which consists of a computer run by the very slowest of CPUs, the human being sans abacus, sans calculator, sans silicon chips and sans hope. The Chinese Room Argument is a trick argument that proves nothing. The computer room is so slow that it cannot ever think or understand Chinese. On the other hand, this doesn't say anything about whether a high-speed computer with the memory and processing power of the human brain might one day speak and understand Chinese quite well.
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