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)

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)

… it is possible for a man to write a piece correctly by chance or at the prompting of another: but he will be literate only if he produces a piece of writing in a literate way, and that means doing it in accordance with the skill of literate composition which he has in himself.Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II 4 1105a23-35.