The Chinese Room argument, created by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence. The argument focuses on a thought experiment in which a man who knows only English is alone in a room using English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese symbols. Outside it appears as if someone in the room understands Chinese. The argument is meant to show that while properly programmed machines may look like conversing in natural language, they lack the ability to understand language, even in principle. Searle argues that the thought experiment does not take into consideration the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. Searle's argument is a blunt challenge to advocates of Artificial Intelligence, and the theory also has wide assumptions for functionalist and computational theories of meaning. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument. My......
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