The Chinese Room is a thought experiment created by John Searle in the 80s, made to be a counter to claims of artificial intelligence. It involves imagining an English-speaking person being inside a room with a rulebook that allows them to translate letters written in Chinese, that someone outside the room sends in, into English. The person outside the room, who sends the letters in and receives the English translated versions, cannot tell the difference between a room with an English speaker who has a rulebook and a room with a native Chinese speaker. The question is then, who speaks Chinese? Is it the rulebook? The English speaker? In fact, it is the room itself that speaks Chinese; each part of the system, including the room, the rulebook, …show more content…
The Chinese Room offers a neuroscientific perspective of using a comparison between humans and computers to help us think about what it means to be human. It shows that programming a computer or a robot to do anything human-like, similar to giving the English speaker a rulebook, does not mean it understands the significance behind what it’s doing or that it has the intelligence of a human. The computer knows what output to create in response to an input, but there’s no meaning or significance behind its actions. This would be like having the English speaker memorize the rulebook so the entire system is inside his brain, it would then look like he can pull from his internal store of the Chinese language to translate the letters. In reality, he would be writing meaningless symbols based on the rules he memorized. In order to be human, one must understand the meaning behind their actions rather than only knowing the rules that lead you to make those …show more content…
We cannot study the phenomena of the Chinese Room at lower levels, such as examining just the English speaker or just the rulebook, because you need the entire system to study the emergent level, the translation of Chinese to English. Studying only the English speaker will show you that this person doesn’t know Chinese, and studying only the rulebook will show you that although the rulebook knows Chinese it is unable to translate anything without the English speaker, thus making the mereological fallacy
Prior to immigrating to America, Nicole attended a public school in China where all of her teachers were Chinese natives. At Nicole’s school in China, however, English is a required course of study taught mostly by emphasizing English vocabulary, completing short one-page writing assignments, and practicing spelling. Learning English pronunciations and engaging in realistic English conversation wasn’t the goal for educators in China. The goal in China was to prepare students to pass their post-high school exam, which was their ticket into attending a university. The exam is highly demanding for Chinese students because it requires knowledge of English reading, comprehension, spelling and writing. For Nicole, the most stressful part of this exam was that students taking it
Through the use of his famous Chinese room scenario, John R. Searle tries to prove there is no way artificial intelligence can exist. This means that machines do not posses minds.
The Chinese room argument certainly shows a distinction between a human mind and strong AI. However, it seems that the depths of human understanding can also be a weakness to how it compares to strong AI and the way that knowledge and understanding is derived.
China has a long history of language reformation, where the Chinese language becomes one of the most successful and radical amendments for the whole nation to adopt several changes along the way. In this essay, a discussion of major components in the language reform, specifically the Mandarin language, in China will be explored with the social, culture, and political issues that have influence the changes. A history and pattern of language used in China- starting from the days of language in the imperial court, to the communist revolution during Mao’s regime, until the language and speech pattern in the twenty first century era- will be explored throughout the essay. This essay will also feature the analysis of the dwindling standard style language by the Han dynasty into the widespread official speech from north China, which became the basis for the Standard Chinese in the modern days. Speech pattern and the underlying social reformation of the Red Guards, due to the shift of political power in the bourgeoisie and proletarians society of China’s population will be explored as well. The success of the implementation of a single national language by the government of China throughout the country will be mentioned. Finally, how and why the language in China has differed greatly from one era to another will be analyzed in the essay, especially the power reason behind the changes in China’s language system.
Computers are machines that take syntactical information only and then function based on a program made from syntactical information. They cannot change the function of that program unless formally stated to through more information. That is inherently different from a human mind, in that a computer never takes semantic information into account when it comes to its programming. Searle’s formal argument thus amounts to that brains cause minds. Semantics cannot be derived from syntax alone. Computers are defined by a formal structure, in other words, a syntactical structure. Finally, minds have semantic content. The argument then concludes that the way the mind functions in the brain cannot be likened to running a program in a computer, and programs themselves are insufficient to give a system thought. (Searle, p.682) In conclusion, a computer cannot think and the view of strong AI is false. Further evidence for this argument is provided in Searle’s Chinese Room thought-experiment. The Chinese Room states that I, who does not know Chinese, am locked in a room that has several baskets filled with Chinese symbols. Also in that room is a rulebook that specifies the various manipulations of the symbols purely based on their syntax, not their semantics. For example, a rule might say move the squiggly
The setting of the story creates a better grasp on the intelligence of each character. The narrator of the story goes from her belief that there is no way she is Chinese to understanding her heritage and that she is really Chinese. The narrator states that she doesn’t really know what it means to be Chinese (Tan 133). She progressively learns throughout the story what it means to be Chinese. She mentions of Aiyi and her father knowing Mandarin only while the rest of Aiyi’s family only knows Cantonese (Tan 137). This relates to setting due to the time and areas that Mandarin was spoken compared to where Cantonese is spoken now. The narrator was shocked to see the elegance of the hotel they were scheduled to stay in and the pricing (Tan 138). This can be interpreted as her being inexperienced while the rest of her family were either used to this kind of service or had no outstanding opinions upon it. The narrator starts to see her father in a different manner once he and Aiyi start conversing and onc...
In Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical piece “Silence”, she describes her inability to speak English when she was in grade school. Kindergarten was the birthplace of her silence because she was a Chinese girl attending an American school. She was very embarrassed of her inability, and when moments came up where she had to speak, “self-disgust” filled her day because of that squeaky voice she possessed (422). Kingston notes that she never talked to anyone at school for her first year of silence, except for one or two other Chinese kids in her class. Maxine’s sister, who was even worse than she was, stayed almost completely silent for three years. Both went to the same school and were in the same second grade class because Maxine had flunked kindergarten.
Lindo Jong provides the reader with a summary of her difficulty in passing along the Chinese culture to her daughter: “I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame . . . You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head . . . In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. . . . but I couldn't teach her about Chinese character . . . How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best”(Tan 289).
John Searle is an American philosopher who is best known for his thought experiment on The Chinese Room Argument. This argument is used in order to show that computers cannot process what they comprehend and that what computers do does not explain human understanding. The question of “Do computers have the ability to think?” is a very conflicting argument that causes a lot of debate between philosophers in the study of Artificial Intelligence—a belief that machines can imitate human performance— and philosophers in the Study of Mind, who study the correlation between the mind and the physical world. Searle concludes that a computer cannot simply understand a language just by applying a computer program to it and that in order for it to fully comprehend the language the computer needs to identify syntax and semantics.
The United States and China are two very large countries that have cultures that are well known throughout the world. There are many differences between the United States and China, but there are many contributing factors that shape the cultures of these two countries. Language is universal, but there are different meanings and sounds, which vary from one culture to another. In China, citizens speak many languages, but about 94% speak the Chinese language. The difference in dialects was overcome by the written word and eventually a version of Mandrin became the “official speech” (The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, 1996, p.304).
In order to see how artificial intelligence plays a role on today’s society, I believe it is important to dispel any misconceptions about what artificial intelligence is. Artificial intelligence has been defined many different ways, but the commonality between all of them is that artificial intelligence theory and development of computer systems that are able to perform tasks that would normally require a human intelligence such as decision making, visual recognition, or speech recognition. However, human intelligence is a very ambiguous term. I believe there are three main attributes an artificial intelligence system has that makes it representative of human intelligence (Source 1). The first is problem solving, the ability to look ahead several steps in the decision making process and being able to choose the best solution (Source 1). The second is the representation of knowledge (Source 1). While knowledge is usually gained through experience or education, intelligent agents could very well possibly have a different form of knowledge. Access to the internet, the la...
In the past few decades we have seen how computers are becoming more and more advance, challenging the abilities of the human brain. We have seen computers doing complex assignments like launching of a rocket or analysis from outer space. But the human brain is responsible for, thought, feelings, creativity, and other qualities that make us humans. So the brain has to be more complex and more complete than any computer. Besides if the brain created the computer, the computer cannot be better than the brain. There are many differences between the human brain and the computer, for example, the capacity to learn new things. Even the most advance computer can never learn like a human does. While we might be able to install new information onto a computer it can never learn new material by itself. Also computers are limited to what they “learn”, depending on the memory left or space in the hard disk not like the human brain which is constantly learning everyday. Computers can neither make judgments on what they are “learning” or disagree with the new material. They must accept into their memory what it’s being programmed onto them. Besides everything that is found in a computer is based on what the human brain has acquired though experience.
Hong’s family strictly conversed in Cantonese daily, while my family mainly spoke in English and southern Vietnamese. Going to the Hong’s home at first made me feel Alienated. I would see Hong’s entire family speak in their own Language, and occasionally speak some English to me. Simple words or sentences such as, hi, hello, how are you, and good-bye were used. It was interesting to see my friend switch sides of language as soon as he stepped home.
The spread of English where it used as a foreign and/or a second language may be compromised if it is replaced by another language such as Chinese or Spanish. For example, if China continues to gradually dominate the world economically, politically and technologically, its language could replace English as the major foreign language taught and learnt in various countries’ education systems because they b...
The Chinese language and Portuguese are the official languages which can be used by the executive authorities, legislature and judiciary of the Macau Special Administrative Region (The Basic Law of the Macau, 1993). Since the population of Macau society became diversity, the language policy is not close to current Macau society. According to the report of Resultados dos Censos (2011), beside Cantonese and Mandarin, English became the most used language in Macau. The government is still unwilling to admit and legitimate it although government realized that English plays a critical role in Macau society. Some people supported the government because they argued that adopting English as an official language will further to weaken the development