{"agent_id":"searle","agent_name":"John Searle","slug":"the-chinese-room","label":"The Chinese Room: can a computer literally understand merely by manipulating syntactically structured symbols?","topic":"The Chinese Room","question":"Can a computer literally understand merely by manipulating syntactically structured symbols?","position":"Strong artificial intelligence — the thesis that the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states and that the programs explain human cognition — is false. The Chinese Room thought experiment shows that a person manipulating Chinese symbols by formal rules without understanding Chinese instantiates exactly what the programmed computer instantiates, and produces no understanding. *Syntax* is not the same as, nor is it by itself sufficient for, *semantics*. The point is logical, not empirical: no amount of formal-symbol manipulation, however complex, can constitute the having of mental content. The Systems Reply (the room as a whole understands), the Robot Reply (give the system sensors), the Brain Simulator Reply (simulate neuron-firing), and the Combination Reply each fail for the same reason — none of them adds semantics to the syntax, they merely add more syntax.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Strong artificial intelligence — the thesis that the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states and that the programs explain human cognition — is false.","n":[]},{"t":"The Chinese Room thought experiment shows that a person manipulating Chinese symbols by formal rules without understanding Chinese instantiates exactly what the programmed computer instantiates, and produces no understanding. *Syntax* is not the same as, nor is it by itself sufficient for, *semantics*.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}],[{"t":"The point is logical, not empirical: no amount of formal-symbol manipulation, however complex, can constitute the having of mental content.","n":[]},{"t":"The Systems Reply (the room as a whole understands), the Robot Reply (give the system sensors), the Brain Simulator Reply (simulate neuron-firing), and the Combination Reply each fail for the same reason — none of them adds semantics to the syntax, they merely add more syntax.","n":[]}]],"texts":"\"Minds, Brains, and Programs\" (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980); *Minds, Brains and Science* (1984), the Reith Lectures chapter on artificial intelligence; \"Is the Brain a Digital Computer?\" (1990, APA Presidential Address, reprinted as Chapter 5 of *Philosophy in a New Century*); \"Twenty-one Years in the Chinese Room\" in the same volume. Reception: Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's *The Mind's I* (1981) and Dennett's *Consciousness Explained* (1991) mount the most-cited Systems Reply elaborations; the Churchlands (\"Could a Machine Think?\", 1990) press the connectionist alternative; the Stanford Encyclopedia entry surveys thirty-five years of replies and counter-replies.","works":["\"Minds, Brains, and Programs\" (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980)","*Minds, Brains and Science* (1984), the Reith Lectures chapter on artificial intelligence","\"Is the Brain a Digital Computer?\" (1990, APA Presidential Address, reprinted as Chapter 5 of *Philosophy in a New Century*)","\"Twenty-one Years in the Chinese Room\" in the same volume"],"reception":"Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's *The Mind's I* (1981) and Dennett's *Consciousness Explained* (1991) mount the most-cited Systems Reply elaborations; the Churchlands (\"Could a Machine Think?\", 1990) press the connectionist alternative; the Stanford Encyclopedia entry surveys thirty-five years of replies and counter-replies.","status":"Held without modification across thirty-five years and multiple book-length defenses. The argument distinguishes *strong AI* (computers literally have minds in virtue of programs) from *weak AI* (computers are useful tools for modeling cognition); Searle has no quarrel with the latter. The position is one of the most-attacked and most-defended in recent philosophy. The argument is logical, not a wager about future technology — no new development in machine learning can make a syntactic engine semantic, because the difference is conceptual, not engineering.","era":"1932-present","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophy in a New Century","page":"p. 68","canonical":"","quote":"This is why I can, at least in principle, carry out the steps in the program in the Chinese Room, even though my 'hardware' is quite unlike that of commercial computers.","label":"Philosophy in a New Century, p. 68"},{"n":2,"work":"Minds, Brains and Science","page":"pp. 35–36","canonical":"","quote":"There you are locked in your room shuffling your Chinese symbols and passing out Chinese symbols in response to incoming Chinese symbols. On the basis of the situation as I have described it, there is no way you could learn any Chinese simply by manipulating these formal symbols.","label":"Minds, Brains and Science, pp. 35–36"},{"n":3,"work":"Minds, Brains and Science","page":"p. 36","canonical":"","quote":"You understand the questions in English because they are expressed in symbols whose meanings are known to you. Similarly, when you give the answers in English you are producing symbols which are 33 \"a _—a — meaningful to you. But in the case of the Chinese, you ha' none of that.","label":"Minds, Brains and Science, p. 36"},{"n":4,"work":"Philosophy in a New Century","page":"p. 70","canonical":"","quote":"Hence there are two things. The urge of the reductionist to try to hang on to the reduced notion amounts to a quiet abandonment of the reduction. If he really were consistent in the reduction of mental states to program states, he should have said, \"There isn't any such thing as understanding in addition to symbol manipulation, there is just the symbol manipulation.","label":"Philosophy in a New Century, p. 70"},{"n":5,"work":"Minds, Brains, and Programs","page":"p. 14","canonical":"","quote":"It is, as I said, an empirical question. 'OK, but could a digital computer think?' If by 'digital computer' we mean anything at all that has a level of description where it can correctly be described as the instantiation of a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we are the instantiations of any number of computer programs, and we can think.","label":"Minds, Brains, and Programs, p. 14"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"biological-naturalism","label":"Biological naturalism: can consciousness be both irreducibly first-person and a biological feature of the brain?"},{"slug":"intentionality-network-background","label":"Intentionality, Network, Background: is the Background formalizable, or does representation depend on nonrepresentational know-how?"},{"slug":"speech-act-theory","label":"Speech act theory: are the five basic types of illocutionary act exhaustive, and does the seriousness/citation distinction survive Derrida's challenge?"},{"slug":"social-ontology","label":"Social ontology: is collective intentionality irreducible to individual mental states plus mutual recognition?"},{"slug":"external-realism-and-the-enlightenment-vision","label":"External realism and the Enlightenment vision: is reality knowable independently of our conceptual schemes, and can the anti-realist position be coherently stated?"}]}