Editing Chinese room (section)

== Computer science ==
The Chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the philosophy of mind, and both major computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to their fields.{{sfn|Russell|Norvig|2021|p=986}} However, several concepts developed by computer scientists are essential to understanding the argument, including [[physical symbol system|symbol processing]], [[Turing machine]]s, [[Turing completeness]], and the Turing test.

=== Strong AI vs. AI research ===
Searle's arguments are not usually considered an issue for AI research. The primary mission of artificial intelligence research is only to create useful systems that act intelligently and it does not matter if the intelligence is "merely" a simulation. AI researchers [[Stuart J. Russell]] and [[Peter Norvig]] wrote in 2021: "We are interested in programs that behave intelligently. Individual aspects of consciousness—awareness, self-awareness, attention—can be programmed and can be part of an intelligent machine. The additional project making a machine conscious in exactly the way humans are is not one that we are equipped to take on."{{sfn|Russell|Norvig|2021|p=986}}

Searle does not disagree that AI research can create machines that are capable of highly intelligent behavior. The Chinese room argument leaves open the possibility that a digital machine could be built that acts more intelligently than a person, but does not have a mind or intentionality in the same way that brains do.

Searle's "strong AI hypothesis" should not be confused with "strong AI" as defined by [[Ray Kurzweil]] and other futurists,{{sfn|Kurzweil|2005|p=260}}{{sfn|Russell|Norvig|2021|p=981}} who use the term to describe machine intelligence that rivals or exceeds human intelligence—that is, [[artificial general intelligence]], [[progress in artificial intelligence|human level AI]] or [[superintelligence]]. Kurzweil is referring primarily to the <em>amount</em> of intelligence displayed by the machine, whereas Searle's argument sets no limit on this. Searle argues that a superintelligent machine would not necessarily have a mind and consciousness.

=== Turing test ===
{{main|Turing test}}
[[File:Turing Test version 3.png|thumb|The "standard interpretation" of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is given the task of trying to determine which player—A or B—is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions to make the determination. Image adapted from Saygin, et al. 2000.{{sfn|Saygin|Cicekli|Akman|2000}}]]
The Chinese room implements a version of the Turing test.{{sfn|Turing|1950}} [[Alan Turing]] introduced the test in 1950 to help answer the question "can machines think?" In the standard version, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

Turing then considered each possible objection to the proposal "machines can think", and found that there are simple, obvious answers if the question is de-mystified in this way. He did not, however, intend for the test to measure for the presence of "consciousness" or "understanding". He did not believe this was relevant to the issues that he was addressing. He wrote:
{{blockquote|I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper.{{sfn|Turing|1950}}}}

To Searle, as a philosopher investigating in the nature of mind and consciousness, these are the relevant mysteries. The Chinese room is designed to show that the Turing test is insufficient to detect the presence of consciousness, even if the room can behave or function as a conscious mind would.

=== Symbol processing ===
{{Main|Physical symbol system}}
Computers manipulate physical objects in order to carry out calculations and do simulations. AI researchers [[Allen Newell]] and [[Herbert A. Simon]] called this kind of machine a [[physical symbol system]]. It is also equivalent to the [[formal system]]s used in the field of [[mathematical logic]].

Searle emphasizes the fact that this kind of symbol manipulation is [[syntactic]] (borrowing a term from the study of [[grammar]]). The computer manipulates the symbols using a form of syntax, without any knowledge of the symbol's [[semantics]] (that is, their [[Meaning (semiotics)|meaning]]).

Newell and Simon had conjectured that a physical symbol system (such as a digital computer) had all the necessary machinery for "general intelligent action", or, as it is known today, [[artificial general intelligence]]. They framed this as a philosophical position, the [[physical symbol system|physical symbol system hypothesis]]: "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action."{{sfn|Newell|Simon|1976|p=116}}{{sfn|Russell|Norvig|2021|p=19}} The Chinese room argument does not refute this, because it is framed in terms of "intelligent action", i.e. the external behavior of the machine, rather than the presence or absence of understanding, consciousness and mind.

Twenty-first century AI programs (such as "[[deep learning]]") do mathematical operations on huge matrixes of unidentified numbers and bear little resemblance to the symbolic processing used by AI programs at the time Searle wrote his critique in 1980. [[Nils John Nilsson|Nils Nilsson]] describes systems like these as "dynamic" rather than "symbolic". Nilsson notes that these are essentially digitized representations of dynamic systems—the individual numbers do not have a specific semantics, but are instead [[sample (signal)|sample]]s or [[data point]]s from a dynamic signal, and it is the signal being approximated which would have semantics. Nilsson argues it is not reasonable to consider these signals as "symbol processing" in the same sense as the physical symbol systems hypothesis.{{sfn|Nilsson|2007}}

===Chinese room and Turing completeness===
{{See also|Turing completeness|Church–Turing thesis}}
The Chinese room has a design analogous to that of a modern computer. It has a [[Von Neumann architecture]], which consists of a program (the book of instructions), some memory (the papers and file cabinets), a machine that follows the instructions (the man), and a means to write symbols in memory (the pencil and eraser). A machine with this design is known in [[theoretical computer science]] as "[[Turing complete]]", because it has the necessary machinery to carry out any computation that a Turing machine can do, and therefore it is capable of doing a step-by-step simulation of any other digital machine, given enough memory and time. Turing writes, "all digital computers are in a sense equivalent."{{sfn|Turing|1950|p=442}} The widely accepted [[Church–Turing thesis]] holds that any function computable by an effective procedure is computable by a Turing machine.

The Turing completeness of the Chinese room implies that it can do whatever any other digital computer can do (albeit much, much more slowly). Thus, if the Chinese room does not or can not contain a Chinese-speaking mind, then no other digital computer can contain a mind. Some replies to Searle begin by arguing that the room, as described, cannot have a Chinese-speaking mind. Arguments of this form, according to [[Stevan Harnad]], are "no refutation (but rather an affirmation)"{{sfn|Harnad|2001|p=14}} of the Chinese room argument, because these arguments actually imply that no digital computers can have a mind.{{sfn|Harnad|2001}}

There are some critics, such as Hanoch Ben-Yami, who argue that the Chinese room cannot simulate all the abilities of a digital computer, such as being able to determine the current time.{{sfn|Ben-Yami|1993}}