How computers work so well has always been in question. For example, when someone goes on google translate or uses a calculator, the computer gives back the answer within seconds. The question though is, how does the computer give these answers so fast?, do computers have minds? To try and answer these question, two very important men, John Searle and Alan Turing tryed to answer them the best that they could. John Searle and Alan Turing both came up with ways to prove or not prove that computers think. John Searle is an American philosopher who has significantly contributed ideas about the philosophy of the mind (Fotion). Alan Turing was an english mathematician and educator who developed the turing test to try and prove if computers have minds. …show more content…
The test consists of three people, a man or woman (A), a computer (B), and an interrogator of either sex (Hauser). The interrogator proceeds to ask questions to both (A) and (B). The challenge for the interrogator is to chose which one out of (A) and (B) is the human and which is the computer (Hauser). The Turing Test's mission is to try and challenge the interrogators decision when trying to decide between the computers answers and the humans answers. This test was made to try and answer the questions, do computers think? Or do computers have a mind? Even though the humans answers and computers had great answers and seemed the same, computers would never be able to mimic actual humans and would never be as smart as us (Hauser). The Turing test was one of the most important tests to try and prove if computers have minds or …show more content…
The example used is if the computer understands Chinese, but Searle shows that a computer can not understand but can mimic the understanding of the language. Searle writes that if a computer is given a question in Chinese, then they will go all the way back into their memory (Byrne, Cohen, Rosen, Shiffrin 388). Computers have numerous amounts of files in their databases that they always go back into to get correct answers to the questions asked. Even if the answers are as good as native speakers, computers have been programmed to do that and make the computer's sound fluent in the language or intelligent in the subject asked. Did computers understand languages like those native to them or know everything in a subject like someone who is an expert in their field?, or were they just programmed like that (Byrne, Cohen, Rosen, Shiffrin