Editing John Searle (section)

====Artificial intelligence====
{{See also|Chinese room|philosophy of artificial intelligence}}
Biological naturalism implies that if humans want to create a conscious being, they will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict what he calls "[[Chinese room#Strong AI|Strong AI]]", defined by the assumption that "the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to ''understand'' and have other cognitive states."<ref name=":2" />

In 1980, Searle presented the "[[Chinese room]]" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI.<ref name=":2">[http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.searle2.html "Minds, Brains and Programs"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20010221025515/http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.searle2.html |date=2001-02-21}}, ''The Behavioral and Brain Sciences''.3, pp. 417–424. (1980)</ref> A person is in a room with two slits, and they have a book and some scratch paper. This person does not know any Chinese. Someone outside the room slides some Chinese characters in through the first slit; the person in the room follows the instructions in the book, transcribing the characters as instructed onto the scratch paper, and slides the resulting sheet out by the second slit. To people outside the room, it appears that the room speaks Chinese – they have slid Chinese statements into one slit and got valid responses in English – yet the 'room' does not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the [[thought experiment]] suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all that the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Searle/searle-con4.html|title=Conversation with John Searle, p.4 of 6|website=globetrotter.berkeley.edu}}</ref><ref name="Roberts">{{cite journal |last1=Roberts |first1=Jacob |title=Thinking Machines: The Search for Artificial Intelligence |journal=Distillations |date=2016 |volume=2 |issue=2 |pages=14–23 |url=https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/thinking-machines-the-search-for-artificial-intelligence |access-date=March 22, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180819152455/https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/thinking-machines-the-search-for-artificial-intelligence |archive-date=August 19, 2018 |url-status=dead}}</ref> [[Douglas Hofstadter]] and [[Daniel Dennett]] in their book ''[[The Mind's I]]'' criticize Searle's view of AI, particularly the Chinese room argument.<ref>Hofstadter, D., 1981, 'Reflections on Searle', in Hofstadter and Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I, New York: Basic Books, pp. 373–382.</ref>

[[Stevan Harnad]] argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for [[Functionalism (philosophy of mind)|functionalism]] and [[computationalism]], and that these positions are the real targets of his critique.<ref>[http://cogprints.org/4023/ Harnad, Stevan (2001)], "What's Wrong and Right About Searle's Chinese Room Argument", in M.; Preston, J., ''Essays on Searle's Chinese Room Argument'', Oxford University Press.</ref> Functionalists argue that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if humans wrote a computer program that was conscious, they could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, contending that consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion is built on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well it simulates fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are ''observer-relative'': observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have ''causal efficacy'' and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.<ref>Searle 1980</ref>