John Searle

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In his work “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, John Searle says that in order to properly discuss whether strong Artificial Intelligence is possible, we must first ask the following question: could something think, understand and so on solely by virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? In this essay I will discuss what the correct answer to this question could be. I will first focus on Alan Turing’s view that with the correct program, a computer could think. I will then move on to John Searle’s view that programs are not sufficient for intentionality, so the answer to the question is no. Finally, I will show why Searle’s argument, seemingly strong, seems to fall short when he talks about what he calls causal powers.

One of the …show more content…

For example, he does agree that a computer may eventually be able to win the Imitation Game, and he also agrees with the idea that a machine can think, because we humans are in fact thinking machines. However, Searle believes that a digital computer having the right program and exhibiting the right behaviour is not sufficient for the presence of thought. He explains this by imagining what he calls the Chinese Room, where a monolingual English man is in a room and must follow English instructions for manipulating symbols that he cannot understand. Unbeknownst to him, the symbols are actually Chinese letters, and the sets of symbols he is creating by following the instructions are sentences. The man seems to be able to speak fluent Chinese, but that is untrue as he is just using instructions, and does not understand the meaning of the symbols he is manipulating. Searle’s argument is that a computer works the same way by manipulating symbols only using their syntax—it will never genuinely understand Chinese (Cole, 2015). Indeed, the symbol manipulations don’t have intentionality as they have no semantics, which according to Searle, is what sets human mind apart from computers – semantics are what give symbols (e.g. letters) meaning (e.g. words and sentences). Computers may be able to exhibit the right behaviour, but it does not understand why it does so, or what the meaning of its behaviour is, which is why computers are …show more content…

He states that any attempt to create intentionality artificially would only succeed if we manage to duplicate the causal powers of the brain, because “anything with a mind must have causal powers at least equivalent to those of the brain” (Warfield, 1999, p. 29). This seems to be a valid assumption, but according to Warfield, Searle takes it too far. It is true that a minimal amount of power is necessary to create a mind, but we do not know what this minimal amount is. Searle claims that it is the full causal power of the brain that is necessary to produce a mind, and uses the following example: if a petrol engine allows a car to drive up to 75 miles an hour, then a diesel engine, in order to do the same, must have at least the same amount of power as the petrol engine. This example assumes that the full power of the petrol engine is necessary to drive at 75 miles an hour, but this seems false. Indeed, the petrol engine could allow the car to go even faster, so the maximum power is not necessary to drive 75 miles an hour; only a certain amount of power is. In this case, we could assume that a diesel engine could have the power to drive at 75 miles an hour, but be less powerful than the petrol engine; for example, it only allowed the car to go up to 85 miles an hour. If we apply this to the brain, we could say that its full causal power is perhaps not necessary for

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