Editing Chinese room (section)

=== Speed and complexity: appeals to intuition ===
The following arguments (and the intuitive interpretations of the arguments above) do not directly explain how a Chinese speaking mind could exist in Searle's room, or how the symbols he manipulates could become meaningful. However, by raising doubts about Searle's intuitions they support other positions, such as the system and robot replies. These arguments, if accepted, prevent Searle from claiming that his conclusion is obvious by undermining the intuitions that his certainty requires.

Several critics believe that Searle's argument relies entirely on intuitions. Block writes "Searle's argument depends for its force on intuitions that certain entities do not think."<ref>Quoted in {{Harvnb|Cole|2004|p=13}}.</ref> [[Daniel Dennett]] describes the Chinese room argument as a misleading "[[intuition pump]]"{{sfn|Dennett|1991|pp=437–440}} and writes "Searle's thought experiment depends, illicitly, on your imagining too simple a case, an irrelevant case, and drawing the obvious conclusion from it."{{sfn|Dennett|1991|pp=437–440}}

Some of the arguments above also function as appeals to intuition, especially those that are intended to make it seem more plausible that the Chinese room contains a mind, which can include the robot, commonsense knowledge, brain simulation and connectionist replies. Several of the replies above also address the specific issue of complexity. The connectionist reply emphasizes that a working artificial intelligence system would have to be as complex and as interconnected as the human brain. The commonsense knowledge reply emphasizes that any program that passed a Turing test would have to be "an extraordinarily supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with 'world knowledge' and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge", as [[Daniel Dennett]] explains.{{sfn|Dennett|1991|p=438}}

==== Speed and complexity replies ====
Many of these critiques emphasize speed and complexity of the human brain,{{efn|Speed and complexity replies are made by [[Daniel Dennett]], [[Tim Maudlin]], [[David Chalmers]], [[Steven Pinker]], [[Paul Churchland]], [[Patricia Churchland]] and others.{{sfn|Cole|2004|p=14}} Daniel Dennett points out the complexity of world knowledge.{{sfn|Dennett|1991|p=438}}}} which processes information at 100 billion operations per second (by some estimates).{{sfn|Crevier|1993|p=269}} Several critics point out that the man in the room would probably take millions of years to respond to a simple question, and would require "filing cabinets" of astronomical proportions.<ref>{{Harvnb|Cole|2004|pp=14–15}}; {{Harvnb|Crevier|1993|pp=269–270}}; {{Harvnb|Pinker|1997|p=95}}.</ref> This brings the clarity of Searle's intuition into doubt.

An especially vivid version of the speed and complexity reply is from [[Paul Churchland|Paul]] and [[Patricia Churchland]]. They propose this analogous thought experiment: "Consider a dark room containing a man holding a bar magnet or charged object. If the man pumps the magnet up and down, then, according to [[James Clerk Maxwell|Maxwell]]'s theory of artificial luminance (AL), it will initiate a spreading circle of electromagnetic waves and will thus be luminous. But as all of us who have toyed with magnets or charged balls well know, their forces (or any other forces for that matter), even when set in motion produce no luminance at all. It is inconceivable that you might constitute real luminance just by moving forces around!"{{sfn|Churchland|Churchland|1990}} Churchland's point is that the problem is that he would have to wave the magnet up and down something like 450 trillion times per second in order to see anything.<ref>{{Harvnb|Churchland|Churchland|1990}}; {{Harvnb|Cole|2004|p=12}}; {{Harvnb|Crevier|1993|p=270}}; {{Harvnb|Fearn|2007|pp=45–46}}; {{Harvnb|Pinker|1997|p=94}}.</ref>

[[Stevan Harnad]] is critical of speed and complexity replies when they stray beyond addressing our intuitions. He writes "Some have made a cult of speed and timing, holding that, when accelerated to the right speed, the computational may make a [[phase transition]] into the mental. It should be clear that is not a counterargument but merely an ad hoc speculation (as is the view that it is all just a matter of ratcheting up to the right degree of 'complexity.')"{{sfn|Harnad|2001|p=7}}{{efn|Critics of the "phase transition" form of this argument include Stevan Harnad, [[Tim Maudlin]], [[Daniel Dennett]] and David Cole.{{sfn|Cole|2004|p=14}} This "phase transition" idea is a version of [[strong emergentism]] (what Dennett derides as "Woo woo West Coast emergence"{{sfn|Crevier|1993|p=275}}). Harnad accuses Churchland and [[Patricia Churchland]] of espousing strong emergentism. Ray Kurzweil also holds a form of strong emergentism.{{sfn|Kurzweil|2005}}}}

Searle argues that his critics are also relying on intuitions, however his opponents' intuitions have no empirical basis. He writes that, in order to consider the "system reply" as remotely plausible, a person must be "under the grip of an ideology".{{sfn|Searle|1980|p=6}} The system reply only makes sense (to Searle) if one assumes that any "system" can have consciousness, just by virtue of being a system with the right behavior and functional parts. This assumption, he argues, is not tenable given our experience of consciousness.