Paper Reading #7 Chinese Room

 sMinds, Brains, and Programs
by John R. Searle

   John R. Searle brings up some interesting points in his paper. On strong A.I., I thought it was unique that he thought all processes in the human mind can be described by systems. In my mind, I do not believe that all the nuances of human thinking can be coded into a machine. For instance, the story example he used, humans take unique hints from stories and generate thought-provoking questions about them. I don't think machines can generate questions such as these because they would have to pick up on the nuances of the question. It is very insightful then to view strong ai with a functionalism or computationalism. It is true that there are states that the human mind goes through like a Turing machine. That would be a serious proponent of artificial intelligence if this system was perfected.
   The biological naturalism approach to strong A.I. was very unique. I likened the consciousness Searle was talking about to a soul. Computers would have to have some amazing algorithm for them to act like humans do. Searle mentioned that a special piece of machinery would have to be developed to give them some sort of consciousness. That would be truly amazing if in the future, mankind developed something akin to this.
   I wanted to discuss Searle's main example of the Chinese room. I agree with him that if we developed a computer to fully "understand" chinese and be able to converse with other chinese speakers, this would have the same effect if we just gave the instruction list to an english speaker and asked him to do it by hand. The computer will never actually understand chinese, its just preset characters that the programmers put into the computer. The subjective part of this story is that some people view the human brain as a processor which just processes what has already been learned. The computer doesn't actually learn chinese in the same sense, but it does use a processor or a brain.This argument segues into the turing machine argument where the computer is just a set of instructions and states however.
   Some people argue that there is no need for perfect A.I., only A.I. that is good enough. This made me think of video games where the A.I. is far from perfect, but if its at least somewhat believable, it gets the job done. This also made me think of the uncanny valley. How perfect can we get A.I. so it seems believable albeit fake before we start hating it.
   One side note I wanted to add was what truly is consciousness? Aren't there different levels so no one person can pin down what it means to understand or be conscious. I feel as if we as a species need to understand what this foundation truly means before we start judging inanimate boxes of circuit boards that can make our lives easier with 1's and 0's.
   In conclusion, did not really enjoy this paper. The idea was interesting, but I felt the paper was poorly written and very opinionated. He seemed as if he got agitated when he was answering the questions that did not agree with his post. I felt this paper was an essential read because every computer scientist knows about this theory and has been discussing about it for 30 years. I will enjoy seeing if this paper is as controversial and discussed about in the next 30 years.