Chinese Room

Comments

TBD

Reference Information

Title: Minds, Brains and Programs
Author: John R. Searle
Presentation Venue: Behavioral and Brain Sciences journal

Summary

The Chinese Room, as devised by Searle, is a thought experiment designed to determine if a computer can understand its input and have higher cognitive states if subjected to the proper programming input. This thought experiment involves an individual sitting in a room manually executing a computer program using as input Chinese characters. These characters have been added into the room by an outside individual to determine whether the person in the room, who does not understand Chinese, can still be said to understand Chinese due to the correct operation of the computer.

Searle ended up concluding that the program does not constitute the mind of the machine no matter how intelligent the resulting interaction may appear. Even though the processing has occurred correctly, it does not indicate that the machine truly understands what it is doing and why.

Discussion

I feel that this is an interesting experiment, as one of the great questions about future AI embodiments is sentience. There have been many popular movies and TV shows that have attempted to explore this, but to date, there is true definitive real world answer. I think it is important to determine the veracity or possibility of this. It might someday lead to important questions of civil rights for robots and virtual AI constructs in a way that we may have a difficult time foreseeing at this time.