John R. Searle's Minds

The ability to relay our thoughts to others relies on intentionality, without meaning and understanding or words would be nothing more than sounds and scribbles. John sealer makes the case through the Chinese Room experiment that there is more to understanding then the ability to correctly process inputs, such as the Chinese symbols. Though Ned Block makes a decent case in favor of the systems ability to understand through the Systems Reply. His case is not enough to convince me that a machine even one as sophisticated as Artificial Neural Network system, could have the same level of understanding as humans. The following will examine the Systems reply to Searle’s argument regarding the inability of the Chinese Room to actually understand things …show more content…
Searle in Minds, Brains, and Programs is weather or not a machine could think? According to the positions in favor of Strong Artificial Intelligence (Strong AI) as presented, “the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the minds; 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” (Searle 417). The position for Strong AI is that computer systems are not limited by their programming but are able to think and reason similar to the functions of human cognitive states. For Searle the issue here is with the statement that computers themselves have cognitive abilities. As he points out with the Chinese Room experiment, where he is locked in a room with various writings in Chinese. He has no experience with the Chinese language yet is able to create responses to questions in Chinese by matching the symbols to those in books written in English, to a native speaker it would appear that Searle could in fact speak Chinese. However for Searle the ability to understand something requires intentionality. For intentionality to occur there must be some level of aboutness, words are used to describe and represent things. It is not as simple as matching up scribbles on paper to the scribbles in a book and then sharing those scribbles with others. Words are uses with intention to convey our thoughts to others. Even if …show more content…
Systems such as the Chinese Room are designed off of the traditional computing system that allows them to be programmed with a set of rules. The ANN systems are not designed to be programmed with particular rules but to learn through examples. Though these systems would pass the Turing Test, their will still be a lack of intentionality. An example of these ANN systems as presented in Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks, describes a system that is designed to identify images and speech recognition. The system is fed various images and sound bites that are processed through its various levels enabling it to process the desired outputs. The system has run into an issue with correctly identifying images that contain other elements, such unable to identify a dumbbell as a stand-alone object. This leads me to presume that this would not sway Searle’s position regarding the lack of intentionality. The system is doing nothing more than manipulating the inputs and identifying the outputs. There is no real understanding behind the systems responses. I could identify the dumbbell on its own; this is because I have experiences with the object and an understanding of its use, whereas the ANN does not recognize the object beyond its association to a body builder. Just like the Chinese room could not properly identify the

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