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Consciousness In The Mind Vs Searle's Argument

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Consciousness in the Mind versus the Computer: Searle’s Argument
There is a view in philosophy that the brain and artificial intelligence are one in the same thing, this theory is called Computational Theory of Mind. It proposes that the human mind is an information processing system, thinking is just computing because the theory also says that the brain is just a computing machine. One philosopher Searle calls this “strong artificial intelligence,” or A1. The consequence to this view is that the mind is not biological, the mind is only the program’s result that the brain runs as a computer. A program is a description of algorithms that produce outputs based on inputs. These inputs require mental representations because it comes in forms of symbols or representations of objects. A computer can only compute the representation of an object, but it cannot compute the actual object itself. …show more content…

I think this criticism signifies that it does not matter whether or not the person understands Chinese, this is beside the point, it only matters that the system as a whole understands. In fact I think the criticism is saying the human being has no significance at all, he/she is just the “central processing unit.” If the system can display understanding of Chinese, then it would indeed have to understand Chinese. Searle could actually be contradicting himself in saying the system can speak Chinese but not understand …show more content…

He would then be the whole system, yet still not understand Chinese because “there is no way that the system can get from the syntax to the semantics” (Searle 680). The point Searle is making is that it does not matter how advanced technology is or how fast a computer can calculate, a computer can only be defined syntactically.
In conclusion, I believe Searle makes an argument against the line of criticism because it seems ridiculous to say that a person does not understand Chinese yet the combination of the person with a pen and paper can. A computer simulation is just that, it just replicates the symbols installed into it to give a reasonable answer to a question it already knows the syntax

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