I argue that John Searle's (1980) influential Chinese room argument (CRA) against computationalism and strong AI survives existing objections, including Block's (1998) internalized systems reply, Fodor's (1991b) deviant causal chain reply, and Hauser's (1997) unconscious content reply. However, a new ``essentialist'' reply I construct shows that the CRA as presented by Searle is an unsound argument that relies on a question-begging appeal to intuition. My diagnosis of the CRA relies on an interpretation of computationalism as a scientific theory about the (...) essential nature of intentional content; such theories often yield non-intuitive results in non-standard cases, and so cannot be judged by such intuitions. However, I further argue that the CRA can be transformed into a potentially valid argument against computationalism simply by reinterpreting it as an indeterminacy argument that shows that computationalism cannot explain the ordinary distinction between semantic content and sheer syntactic manipulation, and thus cannot be an adequate account of content. This conclusion admittedly rests on the arguable but plausible assumption that thought content is interestingly determinate. I conclude that the viability of computationalism and strong AI depends on their addressing the indeterminacy objection, but that it is currently unclear how this objection can be successfully addressed. (shrink)

John Searle's Chinese room argument is perhaps the most influential andwidely cited argument against artificial intelligence (AI). Understood astargeting AI proper – claims that computers can think or do think– Searle's argument, despite its rhetorical flash, is logically andscientifically a dud. Advertised as effective against AI proper, theargument, in its main outlines, is an ignoratio elenchi. It musterspersuasive force fallaciously by indirection fostered by equivocaldeployment of the phrase "strong AI" and reinforced by equivocation on thephrase "causal powers" (at least) equal (...) to those of brains." On a morecarefully crafted understanding – understood just to targetmetaphysical identification of thought with computation ("Functionalism"or "Computationalism") and not AI proper the argument is still unsound,though more interestingly so. It's unsound in ways difficult for high church– "someday my prince of an AI program will come" – believersin AI to acknowledge without undermining their high church beliefs. The adhominem bite of Searle's argument against the high church persuasions of somany cognitive scientists, I suggest, largely explains the undeserved reputethis really quite disreputable argument enjoys among them. (shrink)

Considerations of personal identity bear on John Searle's Chinese Room argument, and on the opposed position that a computer itself could really understand a natural language. In this paper I develop the notion of a virtual person, modelled on the concept of virtual machines familiar in computer science. I show how Searle's argument, and J. Maloney's attempt to defend it, fail. I conclude that Searle is correct in holding that no digital machine could understand language, but wrong in holding that (...) artificial minds are impossible: minds and persons are not the same as the machines, biological or electronic, that realize them. (shrink)

Explaining the mind by building machines with minds runs into the other-minds problem: How can we tell whether any body other than our own has a mind when the only way to know is by being the other body? In practice we all use some form of Turing Test: If it can do everything a body with a mind can do such that we can't tell them apart, we have no basis for doubting it has a mind. But what is (...) "everything" a body with a mind can do? Turing's original "pen-pal" version (the TT) only tested linguistic capacity, but Searle has shown that a mindless symbol-manipulator could pass the TT undetected. The Total Turing Test (TTT) calls for all of our linguistic and robotic capacities; immune to Searle's argument, it suggests how to ground a symbol manipulating system in the capacity to pick out the objects its symbols refer to. No Turing Test, however, can guarantee that a body has a mind. Worse, nothing in the explanation of its successful performance requires a model to have a mind at all. Minds are hence very different from the unobservables of physics (e.g., superstrings); and Turing Testing, though essential for machine-modeling the mind, can really only yield an explanation of the body. (shrink)

A response to a recent critique by Cem Bozşahin of the theory of syntactic semantics as it applies to Helen Keller, and some applications of the theory to the philosophy of computer science.

John R. Searle's problem of the Chinese Room poses an important philosophical challenge to the foundations of strong artificial intelligence, and functionalist, cognitivist, and computationalist theories of mind. Searle has recently responded to three categories of criticisms of the Chinese Room and the consequences he attempts to conclude from it, redescribing the essential features of the problem, and offering new arguments about the syntax-semantics gap it is intended to demonstrate. Despite Searle's defense, the Chinese Room remains ineffective as a counterexample, (...) and poses no real threat to artificial intelligence or mechanist philosophy of mind. The thesis that intentionality is a primitive irreducible relation exemplified by biological phenomena is preferred in opposition to Searle's contrary claim that intentionality is a biological phenomenon exhibiting abstract properties. (shrink)