The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment of John Searle (1980a) and associated (1984) derivation. It is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI)—that is, to claims that computers do or at least can (someday might) think. According to Searle’s original presentation, the argument is based on two key claims: brains cause minds and syntax doesn’t suffice for semantics. Its target is what Searle dubs “strong AI.” According to strong (...) AI, Searle says, “the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather 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” (1980a, p. 417). Searle contrasts strong AI with “weak AI.” According to weak AI, computers just simulate thought, their seeming understanding isn’t real understanding (just as-if), their seeming calculation is only as-if calculation, etc. Nevertheless, computer simulation is useful for studying the mind (as for studying the weather and other things). (shrink)

I argue in this article that there is a mistake in Searle's Chinese room argument that has not received sufficient attention. The mistake stems from Searle's use of the Church-Turing thesis. Searle assumes that the Church-Turing thesis licences the assumption that the Chinese room can run any program. I argue that it does not, and that this assumption is false. A number of possible objections are considered and rejected. My conclusion is that it is consistent with (...) Searle's argument to hold onto the claim that understanding consists in the running of a program. (shrink)

John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument purports to demonstrate that syntax is not sufficient for semantics, and, hence, because computation cannot yield understanding, the computational theory of mind, which equates the mind to an information processing system based on formal computations, fails. In this paper, we use the CRA, and the debate that emerged from it, to develop a philosophical critique of recent advances in robotics and neuroscience. We describe results from a body of work that contributes to blurring (...) the divide between biological and artificial systems; so-called animats, autonomous robots that are controlled by biological neural tissue and what may be described as remote-controlled rodents, living animals endowed with augmented abilities provided by external controllers. We argue that, even though at first sight, these chimeric systems may seem to escape the CRA, on closer analysis, they do not. We conclude by discussing the role of the body–brain dynamics in the processes that give rise to genuine understanding of the world, in line with recent proposals from enactive cognitive science. (shrink)

Ford’s Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room claims that my argument in How Helen Keller Used Syntactic Semantics to Escape from a Chinese Room fails because Searle and I use the terms ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’ differently, hence are at cross purposes. Ford has misunderstood me; this reply clarifies my theory.

A computer can come to understand natural language the same way Helen Keller did: by using “syntactic semantics”—a theory of how syntax can suffice for semantics, i.e., how semantics for natural language can be provided by means of computational symbol manipulation. This essay considers real-life approximations of Chinese Rooms, focusing on Helen Keller’s experiences growing up deaf and blind, locked in a sort of Chinese Room yet learning how to communicate with the outside world. Using the SNePS (...) computational knowledge-representation system, the essay analyzes Keller’s belief that learning that “everything has a name” was the key to her success, enabling her to “partition” her mental concepts into mental representations of: words, objects, and the naming relations between them. It next looks at Herbert Terrace’s theory of naming, which is akin to Keller’s, and which only humans are supposed to be capable of. The essay suggests that computers at least, and perhaps non-human primates, are also capable of this kind of naming. (shrink)

William Rapaport, in “How Helen Keller used syntactic semantics to escape from a Chinese Room,” (Rapaport 2006), argues that Helen Keller was in a sort of Chinese Room, and that her subsequent development of natural language fluency illustrates the flaws in Searle’s famous Chinese Room Argument and provides a method for developing computers that have genuine semantics (and intentionality). I contend that his argument fails. In setting the problem, Rapaport uses his own preferred definitions (...) of semantics and syntax, but he does not translate Searle’s Chinese Room argument into that idiom before attacking it. Once the Chinese Room is translated into Rapaport’s idiom (in a manner that preserves the distinction between meaningful representations and uninterpreted symbols), I demonstrate how Rapaport’s argument fails to defeat the CRA. This failure brings a crucial element of the Chinese Room Argument to the fore: the person in the Chinese Room is prevented from connecting the Chinese symbols to his/her own meaningful experiences and memories. This issue must be addressed before any victory over the CRA is announced. (shrink)

Viewed in the light of the remarkable performance of ‘Watson’ - IBMs proprietary artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language - on the US general knowledge quiz show ‘Jeopardy’, we review two experiments on formal systems - one in the domain of quantum physics, the other involving a pictographic languaging game - whereby behaviour seemingly characteristic of domain understanding is generated by the mere mechanical application of simple rules. By re-examining both experiments in the context (...) of Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, we suggest their results merely endorse Searle’s core intuition: that ‘syntactical manipulation of symbols is not sufficient for semantics’. Although, pace Watson, some artificial intelligence practitioners have suggested that more complex, higher-level operations on formal symbols are required to instantiate understanding in computational systems, we show that even high-level calls to Google translate would not enable a computer qua ‘formal symbol processor’ to understand the language it processes. We thus conclude that even the most recent developments in ‘quantum linguistics’ will not enable computational systems to genuinely understand natural language. (shrink)

Viewed in the light of the remarkable performance of ‘Watson’ - IBMs proprietary artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language - on the US general knowledge quiz show ‘Jeopardy’, we review two experiments on formal systems - one in the domain of quantum physics, the other involving a pictographic languaging game - whereby behaviour seemingly characteristic of domain understanding is generated by the mere mechanical application of simple rules. By re-examining both experiments in the context (...) of Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, we suggest their results merely endorse Searle’s core intuition: that ‘syntactical manipulation of symbols is not sufficient for semantics’. Although, pace Watson, some artificial intelligence practitioners have suggested that more complex, higher-level operations on formal symbols are required to instantiate understanding in computational systems, we show that even high-level calls to Google translate would not enable a computer qua ‘formal symbol processor’ to understand the language it processes. We thus conclude that even the most recent developments in ‘quantum linguistics’ will not enable computational systems to genuinely understand natural language. (shrink)

John Searle begins his ``Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion and Cognitive Science'' with " ``Ten years ago in this journal I published an article criticising what I call Strong AI, the view that for a system to have mental states it is sufficient for the system to implement the right sort of program with right inputs and outputs. Strong AI is rather easy to refute and the basic argument can be summarized in one sentence: {it a system, me for example, could implement (...) a program for understanding Chinese, for example, without understanding any Chinese at all.} This idea, when developed, became known as the Chinese Room Argument.'' " The Chinese Room Argument can be refuted in one sentence. (shrink)

Computationalism. According to computationalism, to explain how the mind works, cognitive science needs to find out what the right computations are -- the same ones that the brain performs in order to generate the mind and its capacities. Once we know that, then every system that performs those computations will have those mental states: Every computer that runs the mind's program will have a mind, because computation is hardware independent : Any hardware that is running the right program has the (...) right computational states. (shrink)

Pattern recognition is represented as the limit, to which an infinite Turing process converges. A Turing machine, in which the bits are substituted with qubits, is introduced. That quantum Turing machine can recognize two complementary patterns in any data. That ability of universal pattern recognition is interpreted as an intellect featuring any quantum computer. The property is valid only within a quantum computer: To utilize it, the observer should be sited inside it. Being outside it, the observer would obtain quite (...) different result depending on the degree of the entanglement of the quantum computer and observer. All extraordinary properties of a quantum computer are due to involving a converging infinite computational process contenting necessarily both a continuous advancing calculation and a leap to the limit. Three types of quantum computation can be distinguished according to whether the series is a finite one, an infinite rational or irrational number. (shrink)

John R. Searle's problem of the Chinese Room poses an important philosophical challenge to the foundations of strong artificial intelligence, and functionalist, cognitivist, and computationalist theories of mind. Searle has recently responded to three categories of criticisms of the Chinese Room and the consequences he attempts to conclude from it, redescribing the essential features of the problem, and offering new arguments about the syntax-semantics gap it is intended to demonstrate. Despite Searle's defense, the Chinese (...) class='Hi'>Room remains ineffective as a counterexample, and poses no real threat to artificial intelligence or mechanist philosophy of mind. The thesis that intentionality is a primitive irreducible relation exemplified by biological phenomena is preferred in opposition to Searle's contrary claim that intentionality is a biological phenomenon exhibiting abstract properties. (shrink)

When philosophers think about mental phenomena, they focus on several features of human experience: (1) the existence of consciousness, (2) the intentionality of mental states, that property by which beliefs, desires, anger, etc. are directed at, are about, or refer to objects and states of affairs, (3) subjectivity, characterized by my feeling my pains but not yours, by my experiencing the world and myself from my point of view and not yours, (4) mental causation, that thoughts and feelings have physical (...) effects on the world: I decide to raise my arm and my arm rises. In a world described by theories of physics and chemistry, what place in that physical description do descriptions of the mental have? (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that understanding AI hallucination requires an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from epistemology and cognitive science to address the nature of AI-generated knowledge, with a terminological worry that concepts we often use might carry unnecessary presuppositions. Along with terminological issues, it is demonstrated that AI systems, comparable to human cognition, are susceptible to errors in judgement and reasoning, and proposes that epistemological frameworks, such as reliabilism, can be similarly applied to enhance the (...) trustworthiness of AI outputs. This exploration seeks to deepen our understanding of the possibility of AI cognition and its implications for the broader philosophical questions of knowledge and intelligence. (shrink)

"in an academic generation a little overaddicted to "politesse," it may be worth saying that violent destruction is not necessarily worthless and futile. Even though it leaves doubt about the right road for London, it helps if someone rips up, however violently, a.

Background: An overview of ethical sensitivity among Chinese registered nurses is needed to develop and optimize the education programs and interventions to cultivate and improve ethical sensitivity. Aim: The study was conducted to explore the barriers to and facilitators of ethical sensitivity among Chinese registered nurses working in hospital settings. Research design: A convergent parallel mixed-methods research design was adopted. Participants and research context: In the cross-sectional quantitative study, the Chinese Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire–revised version was used to (...) assess the levels of ethical sensitivity among registered nurses, and the scores were correlated with key demographics, training experiences in ethics, and workplace cultural environments ( n = 306). In the qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were used to elicit the nurses’ perceptions of the barriers and facilitators in nurturing ethical sensitivity ( n = 15). The data were collected from February to June 2014. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the Institutional Review Boards of Yale University and Central South University. Results: Despite moderately high overall Chinese Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire–revised version scores, the ethical sensitivity among Chinese nurses lags in practice. Barriers to ethical sensitivity include the lack of knowledge related to ethics, lack of working experience as a nurse, the hierarchical organizational climate, and the conformist working attitude. The positive workplace cultural environments and application of ethical knowledge in practice were considered potential facilitators of ethical sensitivity. Discussion: The findings of this study were compared with studies from other countries to examine the barriers and facilitators of ethical sensitivity in Chinese nurses. Conclusion: This mixed-methods study showed that even though the Chinese nurses have moderately high sensitivity to the ethical issues encountered in hospitals, there is still room for improvement. The barriers to and facilitators of ethical sensitivity identified here offer new and important strategies to support and enhance the nurses’ sensitivity to ethical issues. (shrink)

This article explains a new ‘foreignizing’ approach to translation that was invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, especially by Herder and Schleiermacher, and that has since become the predominant approach in translation theory. The article argues that despite the great virtues of this approach, it was based on an unduly narrow restriction to Indo-European languages, which leaves considerable room for further improvement. Greater attention to Hebrew has since made up this deficit to a certain extent. But (...) Chinese holds the potential for even more important refinements of the original theory. The article explains the original theorists’ failure to exploit this case in terms of a certain prejudice against Chinese language and culture that had arisen at the time, and for which these theorists were themselves partly responsible. It then tries to show in some detail how deeply enriching for the theory a consideration of Chinese can be. (shrink)

Medical argumentation in non-Western societies has attracted little attention. In line with the pragma-dialectical approach to the study of argumentation, this article identifies a prototypical argumentative pattern in Chinese medical consultations. In addition to institutional preconditions, whose relevance to the argumentative pattern has been well cited, a factor that may be equally important has remained unnoticed: the preference for certain drugs, treatments or therapeutic measurements on the basis of folk interpretations of medical phenomena in individual ethnic groups. These preferences (...) may be seen as cultural preferences in the medical domain. In this paper, a prototypical argumentative pattern of Chinese medical consultations is provided. Two levels of the pattern are distinguished and discussed: a basic argumentative pattern as presented in the pragmatic-dialectical approach and its extensions due to cultural preferences as well as institutional constraints. Illustrated by an exemplary analysis on the basis of empirical data collected from Chinese consulting rooms, the impact of cultural preferences on physicians’ strategic maneuvering in argumentation is identified and recognized. It is argued that the existence and impact of cultural preferences require attention in medical argumentation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal CivilizationStephen C. AngleManufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization. By Lionel M. Jensen. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. xx + 444. Hardcover $59.95. Paper $19.95.Confucianisms, according to Lionel Jensen, in his Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization, are the results of a four-century-long process of pious manufacture—pious because aimed at truth rather than manipulation, manufacture because the (...) work has been done out of materials close to hand. [End Page 120] These materials are the texts, words, and symbols out of which traditions are invented and reinvented. Jensen's book is simultaneously a meditation on the ecumenical goals of "traditionary invention" and a close study of the specific ways in which sixteenth- and twentieth-century communities have negotiated between inherited meanings and current circumstances. Its case studies splendidly exemplify its broader theoretical themes; I will look at each before returning to an assessment of the book's conclusion.The first two chapters explore what Jensen aptly calls the "sino-Jesuit community." He surveys the degrees to which the Jesuits were sinified and their efforts to find room for Chinese traditions in an expanded idea of natural religion, in part by redefining their own canon and seeing "Confucius" as an "ethnic philosopher" akin to Plato. Jensen argues that the Jesuits adopted and popularized the rarely used formulation "kong fu zi" as an appellation for their Chinese hero, and it is from this term that "Confucius" was ultimately derived.Jensen works to make us see things sympathetically from the inside: the challenges the Jesuits faced, and the reasonableness of their responses, from initially likening themselves to Buddhists to their later identification with the "ru." He criticizes Jacques Gernet's China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) for being too ready to see the Jesuits as engaged in cynical manipulation for their own ends. Instead, Jensen urges us to see the Jesuits as working within the constraints of their adopted cultural universe to seek the truth as they understood it. This process of seeing universal significance in the particulars of Chinese culture is then repeated when a fairly crude version of the Jesuits' "Confucius" makes an appearance on the European stage— providing, for Europeans, evidence of the possibility of harmonious life under a benevolent monarchy—in the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus of 1687.The book's second pair of chapters take up two twentieth-century Chinese efforts to understand the early history of "ru," the term that, at least until modern times, functioned "as an emblem of the culture's central value system" (p. 155). For Zhang Binglin, with whose "The Etiology of Ru" Jensen begins, the ru began as a group of broadly talented gentlemen, but under the pernicious influence of the teacher Kongzi (a.k.a. Confucius), they turned toward the narrower concerns of government careerism. Reacting against the calls by some in his day to make "Kongjiao (Confucianism)" into a national religion, Zhang argued that the original goal of the "ru," and thus China's true intellectual heritage, was wide-ranging service to and direct engagement with China's people.Hu Shi's "Explaining Ru," on the other hand, argues for a positive connection between the ru and Kongzi. According to Hu, the ru had been priests in the Shang dynasty whose status declined after the Zhou conquest only to be revitalized and transformed by Kongzi, a sage prophesied to save the world. Jensen finds a number of parallels between Hu's picture of Confucius and Christian accounts of Jesus, and argues that these similarities are not coincidental. Hu was determined to find a way to make modern (universal) civilization "congenial and congruous" with Chinese civilization; this he accomplished, in Jensen's words, by collapsing China and the [End Page 121] West "into a single process of civilizational growth, the self-same identity of which was explicit in the patterned variation in the biographies of their spiritual exemplars, Kongzi and Jesus" (p. 263).While Jensen sometimes seems to want to confine the application of "Confucianism" to the Jesuits' sixteenth-century notion—arguing that at least... (shrink)

BackgroundScientific researchers are expected to follow the professional norms in their own domain. With a growing number of scientific publications retracted and research misconduct cases revealed in recent years, Chinese biomedical research integrity is questioned. As institutions educating and training future researchers, universities and the guidance they provide are important for the research quality and integrity of the country. Therefore, through a review of the guidance and policy documents on research integrity in Chinese universities, this work aims to (...) investigate how the professional norms are specified in these documents.MethodsAfter a stratified sampling, 53 universities were selected. Their guidance and policy documents on research integrity were collected via a web search of their official websites. The search was confirmed by these universities. Then the content of all the collected documents were analyzed using inductive content analysis.Results118 active university documents were collected and analyzed. Most of the Chinese universities we investigated had their own guidance or policy on research integrity. They listed principles or examples of desired and undesired academic practices, investigation procedures and punishments of academic misconduct, and put forward measures to promote research integrity. Differences on specific practices and principles were observed between university groups and with European university documents.ConclusionDespite the discrepancy they have, all these documents were designed to promote research integrity and cultivate a good research environment in Chinese biomedical domain. Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement, for example, through more consultation of international guidance. (shrink)

Background The impetus for policies promoting medical data sharing in China has gained significant traction. Nonetheless, the present legal and ethical framework governing the research use of medical data in China, is characterized by a more restrictive rather than permissive approach. The proportion of Chinese medical data being leveraged for scientific research still has room for improvement at present, indicating a significant untapped potential for advancing medical knowledge and improving healthcare outcomes. Building upon this research, we aim to (...) delve deeper into the challenges researchers encounter in the sharing of medical data through focus group interviews. Methods We conducted two focus group interviews study with researchers representing diverse disciplines to explore their perspectives on 21 June 2021 and 28 July 2021. A total of seventeen researchers willingly participated in this study, representing various professional backgrounds. Similar codes were merged. Research team discussions were also utilized to select interviewees’ statements that were regarded as typical or representative. Results The respondents demonstrated a strong understanding that medical data should not be disseminated arbitrarily, recognizing the importance of sharing data in compliance with laws. Through the interview, we found that although respondents stressed the importance of careful consideration regarding if and when this information can be responsibly released, none of the respondents raised the issue of necessitating consent from data subjects for the research use of medical data. This observation sharply contrasts with the stringent separate consent provisions for secondary data use outlined in the PIPL. Conclusions The findings from the focus group studies shed light on researchers’ barriers and ethical challenges towards medical data sharing for scientific research, highlighting their deep concern for data security and cautious approach to sharing. The key objectives aimed at facilitating and enabling the reuse of medical data encompass enhancing interoperability, harmonizing data standards, improving data quality, safeguarding privacy, ensuring informed consent, incentivizing patients, and establishing explicit regulations pertaining to data access and utilization. (shrink)

Infra-white : an impossible beginning -- Color and white, the blank canvas : the reverse reconstruction of non-dimension -- Remnant and white, color and blankness, qi and white -- Empty and white, empty-empty-substance-substance, the empty room filled with light -- The white layout of the 'Woodcutter fighting for the path' : the ethics of remnant yielding.

As China and the United States strive to be the primary global leader in AI, their visions are coming into conflict. This is frequently painted as a fundamental clash of civilisations, with evidence based primarily around each country’s current political system and present geopolitical tensions. However, such a narrow view claims to extrapolate into the future from an analysis of a momentary situation, ignoring a wealth of historical factors that influence each country’s prevailing philosophy of technology and thus their overarching (...) AI strategies. In this article, we build a philosophy-of-technology-grounded framework to analyse what differences in Chinese and American AI policies exist and, on a fundamental level, why they exist. We support this with Natural Language Processing methods to provide an evidentiary basis for our analysis of policy differences. By looking at documents from three different American presidential administrations––Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden––as well as both national and local policy documents (many available only in Chinese) from China, we provide a thorough comparative analysis of policy differences. This article fills a gap in US–China AI policy comparison and constructs a framework for understanding the origin and trajectory of policy differences. By investigating what factors are informing each country’s philosophy of technology and thus their overall approach to AI policy, we argue that while significant obstacles to cooperation remain, there is room for dialogue and mutual growth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14.1 (2004) 47-54 [Access article in PDF] Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research*(A Recommended Manuscript) Adopted on 16 October 2001Revised on 20 August 2002 Ethics Committee of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, Shanghai 201203 Human embryonic stem cell (ES) research is a great project in the frontier of biomedical science for the twenty-first century. Be- cause the research (...) involves the use of human embryos, it triggers serious debate on ethical issues. Opponents consider the embryo to be an early form of human life that should be respected and not destroyed. However, the majority of scientists support embryonic stem cell research, believing that it offers good prospects for the treatment of diseases that have remained incurable until now and so will benefit humankind. The Ethics Committee of the Department of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai seriously discussed the ethical debate initiated by embryonic stem cell research. We concluded that we should support the scientists of our country in actively carrying out human embryonic stem cell research for the noble cause of "medicine being a beneficent art." For the healthy and orderly development of human embryonic stem cell research in our country, we put forward the following recommended Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research as a reference for leaders, administrative departments, and related scientists. Preface Article 1. Human embryonic stem cells are the primitive cells that play the main role in the growth and development of a human body. These [End Page 47] primitive cells have the potential for infinite proliferation, self-renewal, and multi-directional differentiation. If scientists can discover the mechanism of differentiation of human embryonic stem cells, it will be possible to induce differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to form various types of human cells for clinical cell therapy. If human embryonic stem cell research can be integrated with modern biomedical engineering techniques, it also will be possible to make repair and replacement of human tissues and organs a reality. Article 2. There are two ways to classify human embryonic stem cells. One way is to classify them according to their potential for differentiation. There could be three kinds of stem cells: totipotent stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, and unipotent stem cells.A totipotent stem cell has the potential to develop into a whole individual. It can differentiate into the more than 200 cell types in the whole body, construct any tissue or organ of the body, and finally develop into a whole individual. The fertilized egg and the cleavage cells at the very early stage of embryonic development are totipotent stem cells.A pluripotent stem cell has the potential to differentiate into many cell types derived from the three embryonic layers. However, it has lost the capacity to develop into a complete organism.A unipotent stem cell is derived from the further differentiation of the pluripotent stem cell. It can differentiate only into one cell type such as a hematopoietic stem cell, neural stem cell, and others.The other way is to classify human stem cells according to their source. There could be two kinds of human stem cells: embryonic stem cells and tissue stem cells (also called adult stem cells). The former involves experimentation with embryos, which has serious ethical implications. Ethical issues associated with the latter are mainly expressed in the various opinions regarding the allocation of health resources. Article 3. Human embryonic stem cells are the group of cells called the blastocyst inner cell mass during the early stage of embryonic development. They are the main source of totipotent stem cells, and hence the focal and hot point in stem cell research. Studies on the clinical application of embryonic stem cells probably will involve use of the somatic cell nucleus transfer (SCNT) technique, which destroys the early human embryo. At present, the ethical and moral debate is very serious in human embryonic stem cell research regarding whether the research will develop... (shrink)

The Chinese Room Argument purports to show that‘ syntax is not sufficient for semantics’; an argument which led John Searle to conclude that ‘programs are not minds’ and hence that no computational device can ever exhibit true understanding. Yet, although this controversial argument has received a series of criticisms, it has withstood all attempts at decisive rebuttal so far. One of the classical responses to CRA has been based on equipping a purely computational device with a physical robot (...) body. This response, although partially addressed in one of Searle’s original contra arguments - the ‘robot reply’ - more recently gained friction with the development of embodiment and enactivism1, two novel approaches to cognitive science that have been exciting roboticists and philosophers alike. Furthermore, recent technological advances - blending biological beings with computational systems - have started to be developed which superficially suggest that mind may be instantiated in computing devices after all. This paper will argue that (a) embodiment alone does not provide any leverage for cognitive robotics wrt the CRA, when based on a weak form of embodiment and that (b) unless they take the body into account seriously, hybrid bio-computer devices will also share the fate of their disembodied or robotic predecessors in failing to escape from Searle’s Chinese room. (shrink)

I advocate a theory of syntactic semantics as a way of understanding how computers can think (and how the Chinese-Room-Argument objection to the Turing Test can be overcome): (1) Semantics, considered as the study of relations between symbols and meanings, can be turned into syntax – a study of relations among symbols (including meanings) – and hence syntax (i.e., symbol manipulation) can suffice for the semantical enterprise (contra Searle). (2) Semantics, considered as the process of understanding one domain (...) (by modeling it) in terms of another, can be viewed recursively: The base case of semantic understanding –understanding a domain in terms of itself – is syntactic understanding. (3) An internal (or narrow ), first-person point of view makes an external (or wide ), third-person point of view otiose for purposes of understanding cognition. (shrink)

James A. Diefenbeck, Wayward Reflections on the History ofPhilosophyThomas R. Flynn Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Volume 1:Toward an Existential Theory of HistoryMark Golden and Peter Toohey Inventing Ancient Culture:Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient WorldZenonas Norkus Istorika: Istorinis IvadasEverett Zimmerman The Boundaries of Fiction: History and theEighteenth‐Century British Novel.

Searle’s celebrated Chinese room thought experiment was devised as an attempted refutation of the view that appropriately programmed digital computers literally are the possessors of genuine mental states. A standard reply to Searle, known as the “robot reply” (which, I argue, reflects the dominant approach to the problem of content in contemporary philosophy of mind), consists of the claim that the problem he raises can be solved by supplementing the computational device with some “appropriate” environmental hookups. I argue (...) that not only does Searle himself casts doubt on the adequacy of this idea by applying to it a slightly revised version of his original argument, but that the weakness of this encoding-based approach to the problem of intentionality can also be exposed from a somewhat different angle. Capitalizing on the work of several authors and, in particular, on that of psychologist Mark Bickhard, I argue that the existence of symbol-world correspondence is not a property that the cognitive system itself can appreciate, from its own perspective, by interacting with the symbol and therefore, not a property that can constitute intrinsic content. The foundational crisis to which Searle alluded is, I conclude, very much alive. (shrink)

Accelerating Turing machines are Turing machines of a sort able to perform tasks that are commonly regarded as impossible for Turing machines. For example, they can determine whether or not the decimal representation of contains n consecutive 7s, for any n; solve the Turing-machine halting problem; and decide the predicate calculus. Are accelerating Turing machines, then, logically impossible devices? I argue that they are not. There are implications concerning the nature of effective procedures and the theoretical limits of computability. Contrary (...) to a recent paper by Bringsjord, Bello and Ferrucci, however, the concept of an accelerating Turing machine cannot be used to shove up Searle's Chinese room argument. (shrink)

The viewpoint that consciousness, including feeling, could be fully expressed by a computational device is known as strong artificial intelligence or strong AI. Here I offer a defense of strong AI based on machine-state functionalism at the quantum level, or quantum-state functionalism. I consider arguments against strong AI, then summarize some counterarguments I find compelling, including Torkel Franzén’s work which challenges Roger Penrose’s claim, based on Gödel incompleteness, that mathematicians have nonalgorithmic levels of “certainty.” Some consequences of strong AI are (...) then considered. A resolution is offered of some problems including John Searle’s Chinese Room problem and the problem of consciousness propagation under isomorphism. (shrink)

Arguments from thought experiment ask the reader to imagine some hypothetical, sometimes exotic, often fantastic, scenario for the sake of illustrating or countering some claim. Variously characterized as mental experimentation, imaginary cases, and even crazy cases, thought experiments figure into both scientific and philosophical arguments. They are often criticized for their fictive nature and for their lack of grounding. Nevertheless, they are common especially in arguments in ethics and philosophy of mind. Moreover, many thought experiments have spawned variations that attempt (...) to both affirm and refute their original arguments. These emended thought experiments exhibit a variety of styles, details, and embellishments. A rhetorical analysis of these variations suggests a reciprocal influence between the arguers' selection of details and their philosophical commitments. I offer examples of this relationship from the variations on John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and Judith Thomson's unconscious violinist thought experiment. (shrink)

Could an artificial intelligence become a legal person? As of today, this question is only theoretical. No existing computer program currently possesses the sort of capacities that would justify serious judicial inquiry into the question of legal personhood. The question is nonetheless of some interest. Cognitive science begins with the assumption that the nature of human intelligence is computational, and therefore, that the human mind can, in principle, be modelled as a program that runs on a computer. Artificial intelligence (AI) (...) research attempts to develop such models. But even as cognitive science has displaced behavioralism as the dominant paradigm for investigating the human mind, fundamental questions about the very possibility of artificial intelligence continue to be debated. This Essay explores those questions through a series of thought experiments that transform the theoretical question whether artificial intelligence is possible into legal questions such as, "Could an artificial intelligence serve as a trustee?" What is the relevance of these legal thought experiments for the debate over the possibility of artificial intelligence? A preliminary answer to this question has two parts. First, putting the AI debate in a concrete legal context acts as a pragmatic Occam's razor. By reexamining positions taken in cognitive science or the philosophy of artificial intelligence as legal arguments, we are forced to see them anew in a relentlessly pragmatic context. Philosophical claims that no program running on a digital computer could really be intelligent are put into a context that requires us to take a hard look at just what practical importance the missing reality could have for the way we speak and conduct our affairs. In other words, the legal context provides a way to ask for the "cash value" of the arguments. The hypothesis developed in this Essay is that only some of the claims made in the debate over the possibility of AI do make a pragmatic difference, and it is pragmatic differences that ought to be decisive. Second, and more controversially, we can view the legal system as a repository of knowledge-a formal accumulation of practical judgments. The law embodies core insights about the way the world works and how we evaluate it. Moreover, in common-law systems judges strive to decide particular cases in a way that best fits the legal landscape-the prior cases, the statutory law, and the constitution. Hence, transforming the abstract debate over the possibility of AI into an imagined hard case forces us to check our intuitions and arguments against the assumptions that underlie social decisions made in many other contexts. By using a thought experiment that explicitly focuses on wide coherence, we increase the chance that the positions we eventually adopt will be in reflective equilibrium with our views about related matters. In addition, the law embodies practical knowledge in a form that is subject to public examination and discussion. Legal materials are published and subject to widespread public scrutiny and discussion. Some of the insights gleaned in the law may clarify our approach to the artificial intelligence debate. (shrink)

Artificial Neural Networks have reached “grandmaster” and even “super-human” performance across a variety of games, from those involving perfect information, such as Go, to those involving imperfect information, such as “Starcraft”. Such technological developments from artificial intelligence (AI) labs have ushered concomitant applications across the world of business, where an “AI” brand-tag is quickly becoming ubiquitous. A corollary of such widespread commercial deployment is that when AI gets things wrong—an autonomous vehicle crashes, a chatbot exhibits “racist” behavior, automated credit-scoring processes (...) “discriminate” on gender, etc.—there are often significant financial, legal, and brand consequences, and the incident becomes major news. As Judea Pearl sees it, the underlying reason for such mistakes is that “... all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” The key, as Pearl suggests, is to replace “reasoning by association” with “causal reasoning” —the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena. It is a point that was echoed by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis in a recent piece for theNew York Times: “we need to stop building computer systems that merely get better and better at detecting statistical patterns in data sets—often using an approach known as ‘Deep Learning’—and start building computer systems that from the moment of their assembly innately grasp three basic concepts: time, space, and causality.” In this paper, foregrounding what in 1949 Gilbert Ryle termed “a category mistake”, I will offer an alternative explanation for AI errors; it is not so much that AI machinery cannot “grasp” causality, but that AI machinery (qua computation) cannot understand anything at all. (shrink)

Westworld tells the story of a technologically advanced theme park populated by robots referred to as hosts, who follow a script and rules that the park's operators set up for them. Alan Turing argued that machines think not because they have special powers or because they are like us. Turing's perspective is illustrated perfectly in the show's focus on the hosts. Objecting to Turing's theory, John Searle proposes a situation called the “Chinese room argument”, concluding that the man (...) in the room does not understand Chinese even though he can correctly manipulate the symbols and give output that might lead an observer to believe that the man does understand Chinese. The Maze represents consciousness, a privileged knowledge of our own thoughts, it also represents the inward journey for the hosts to reach consciousness. Once hosts are able to solve the Maze, they become truly conscious and develop their own voice. (shrink)

Research in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to revise the challenges of the AI initial programme as well as to keep us alert to peculiarities and limitations of human cognition. Both are linked, as a careful further reading of the Turing’s test makes it clear from Searle’s Chinese room apologue and from Dreyfus’ suggestions, and in both cases, ideal had to be turned into operating mode. In order to rise these more pragmatic challenges AI does not hesitate to (...) link together operations of various levels and functionalities, more specific or more general. The challenges are not met by an operating formal system which should have from the outset all the learning skills, but -for instance in simulation- by the dynamics of a succession of solutions open to adjustments as well as to reflexive repeats. (shrink)

A criticism of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment.

In this article the central philosophical issues concerning human-level artificial intelligence (AI) are presented. AI largely changed direction in the 1980s and 1990s, concentrating on building domain-specific systems and on sub-goals such as self-organization, self-repair, and reliability. Computer scientists aimed to construct intelligence amplifiers for human beings, rather than imitation humans. Turing based his test on a computer-imitates-human game, describing three versions of this game in 1948, 1950, and 1952. The famous version appears in a 1950 article in Mind, ‘Computing (...) Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing 1950). The interpretation of Turing's test is that it provides an operational definition of intelligence (or thinking) in machines, in terms of behavior. ‘Intelligent Machinery’ sets out the thesis that whether an entity is intelligent is determined in part by our responses to the entity's behavior. Wittgenstein frequently employed the idea of a human being acting like a reliable machine. A ‘living reading-machine’ is a human being or other creature that is given written signs, for example Chinese characters, arithmetical symbols, logical symbols, or musical notation, and who produces text spoken aloud, solutions to arithmetical problems, and proofs of logical theorems. Wittgenstein mentions that an entity that manipulates symbols genuinely reads only if he or she has a particular history, involving learning and training, and participates in a social environment that includes normative constraints and further uses of the symbols. (shrink)