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Can Machines Think?

 

In addition he is given a list of English rules, for correctly correlating the two. By simply following the English rules, he writes a third set of chinese words which he then returns to someone outside the room. If the first set of script was a story, the second a set of questions, he could be said to be answering the questions. In fact, from the point of view of someone standing outside the room, he would be correctly answering the questions, and thus would appear to be conversant in Chinese. This of course is not the case, as Searle would have no knowledge of what the story was about, and what the questions were asking - he would not be understanding the story.
             This argument is an attempt to demonstrate that although a computer program appears to be understanding a story, it is merely obeying simple instructions, and has no understanding at all. .
             "In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics" (Searle 1984).
             However, depending on hown one observes this problem, it can appear very differently. Regarding the entire room, the person in the room (to whom I shall refer for the sake of continuity of terms as a demon), the scripts and the person outside as a whole, we do have a system that is capable of reading and interpreting Chinese. Hofstadter extends this idea by modifying the scenario so as to shrink it to brain size, the scripts becoming neurons and so on. This effectively creates a system equivalent to the human brain. So what would be the difference between the two. Why would one be acceptable as a thinking system and one not.
             Searle frequently refers to 'causal properties' and 'intentionality' stating that the artificial system proposed by Hofstadter would lack both of them, and that somehow the human brian has both. It is here where the subject of duality comes into the fore. Are the mind and the brain one and the same, or are they separate entities Many religions favour this dualist approach and refer to the mind, as it is in this instance, as a persons soul and regard it as being separate to the physical self.


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