Oct 7, 2022
Philosophy professor John Searle visits Google to discuss the
philosophy of mind and the potential for consciousness in
artificial intelligence.
John is widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of
language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. Among his
notable concepts is the "Chinese room" argument, which challenges
the supposed language comprehension ability of artificial
intelligence.
Searle conceived of the “Chinese room” thought experiment in 1980.
Imagine a native English speaker who cannot read or speak Chinese,
locked in a room with boxes of Chinese symbols together with a book
of instructions for manipulating the symbols. Imagine that people
outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to
the person in the room, are questions in Chinese. And imagine that
by following the book of instructions, the man in the room can pass
out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions.
Thus the person in the room is able to convince the people outside
the room that he understands Chinese, but in fact he does not
understand a word of Chinese.
The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a
computer may make it appear to understand language, but cannot
produce true comprehension. Searle argues the fact that computers
merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have
no true grasp of meaning or semantics. Thus, the theory that human
minds are computer-like computational or information processing
systems is inadequate. Instead, the human mind must result from
biological processes; computers can at best simulate these
biological processes. His argument has large implications for
semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of
consciousness, computer science and cognitive science
generally.
Originally published in December of 2015.
Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.