Editing Chinese room (section)

====Many mansions / wait till next year reply====
:Better technology in the future will allow computers to understand.{{sfn|Searle|1980|p=8}}{{efn|{{harvtxt|Searle|2009}} uses the name "Wait 'Til Next Year Reply".}} Searle agrees that this is possible, but considers this point irrelevant. Searle agrees that there may be other hardware besides brains that have conscious understanding.

These arguments (and the robot or common-sense knowledge replies) identify some special technology that would help create conscious understanding in a machine. They may be interpreted in two ways: either they claim (1) this technology is required for consciousness, the Chinese room does not or cannot implement this technology, and therefore the Chinese room cannot pass the Turing test or (even if it did) it would not have conscious understanding. Or they may be claiming that (2) it is easier to see that the Chinese room has a mind if we visualize this technology as being used to create it.

In the first case, where features like a robot body or a connectionist architecture are required, Searle claims that strong AI (as he understands it) has been abandoned.{{efn|Searle writes that the robot reply "tacitly concedes that cognition is not solely a matter of formal symbol manipulation." {{sfn|Searle|1980|p=7}} Stevan Harnad makes the same point, writing: "Now just as it is no refutation (but rather an affirmation) of the CRA to deny that [the Turing test] is a strong enough test, or to deny that a computer could ever pass it, it is merely special pleading to try to save computationalism by stipulating ad hoc (in the face of the CRA) that implementational details do matter after all, and that the computer's is the 'right' kind of implementation, whereas Searle's is the 'wrong' kind."{{sfn|Harnad|2001|p=14}}}} The Chinese room has all the elements of a Turing complete machine, and thus is capable of simulating any digital computation whatsoever. If Searle's room cannot pass the Turing test then there is no other digital technology that could pass the Turing test. If Searle's room could pass the Turing test, but still does not have a mind, then the Turing test is not sufficient to determine if the room has a "mind". Either way, it denies one or the other of the positions Searle thinks of as "strong AI", proving his argument.

The brain arguments in particular deny strong AI if they assume that there is no simpler way to describe the mind than to create a program that is just as mysterious as the brain was. He writes "I thought the whole idea of strong AI was that we don't need to know how the brain works to know how the mind works."{{sfn|Searle|1980|p=8}} If computation does not provide an explanation of the human mind, then strong AI has failed, according to Searle.

Other critics hold that the room as Searle described it does, in fact, have a mind, however they argue that it is difficult to see—Searle's description is correct, but misleading. By redesigning the room more realistically they hope to make this more obvious. In this case, these arguments are being used as appeals to intuition (see next section).

In fact, the room can just as easily be redesigned to weaken our intuitions. [[Ned Block]]'s [[Blockhead argument]]{{sfn|Block|1981}} suggests that the program could, in theory, be rewritten into a simple [[lookup table]] of [[Production system (computer science)|rules]] of the form "if the user writes ''S'', reply with ''P'' and goto X". At least in principle, any program can be rewritten (or "[[refactored]]") into this form, even a brain simulation.{{efn|That is, any program running on a machine with a finite amount memory.}} In the blockhead scenario, the entire mental state is hidden in the letter X, which represents a [[memory address]]—a number associated with the next rule. It is hard to visualize that an instant of one's conscious experience can be captured in a single large number, yet this is exactly what "strong AI" claims. On the other hand, such a lookup table would be ridiculously large (to the point of being physically impossible), and the states could therefore be overly specific.

Searle argues that however the program is written or however the machine is connected to the world, the mind is being simulated  by a simple step-by-step digital machine (or machines). These machines are always just like the man in the room: they understand nothing and do not speak Chinese. They are merely manipulating symbols without knowing what they mean. Searle writes: "I can have any formal program you like, but I still understand nothing."{{sfn|Searle|1980|p=3}}