Philosophy of Mind - Speaker Deck

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Philosophy of Mind What is the place of minds in a physical universe? George Matthews Spring 2017

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The Mind Body Problem

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The Mind Body Problem “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!” “Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal!” Terry Bisson, “They’re Made out of Meat”

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe?

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? Minds are real but non-physical things. dualism

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? Minds are real but non-physical things. dualism ! Dualists claim there are two basic kinds of stuﬀ in the world, matter and minds. ! This view of the mind has ancient roots – the concept of a soul as an immaterial entity separate from the body is a version of dualism.

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? “Minds” are really just ways of talking about what intelligent creatures do. behaviorism

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? “Minds” are really just ways of talking about what intelligent creatures do. behaviorism ! Behaviorism was the dominant approach to psychology in the ﬁrst half of the 20th century. ! Behaviorists wanted to make the study of the mind scientiﬁc by getting rid of all reference to a private “inner” world and talking only about publically observable and measurable phenomena.

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? Minds are nothing but brains. mind/brain identity theory

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? Minds are nothing but brains. mind/brain identity theory ! The 20th century also saw enormous advances in the study of the brain which continue to this day. ! Mind/brain Identity Theory is an example of a “reductionist” theory in that it tries to reduce statements about minds to statements about brains.

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? Minds are programs running on brains or some other kind of hardware. functionalism

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? Minds are programs running on brains or some other kind of hardware. functionalism ! Functionalism arose in tandem with the development of contemporary cognitive psychology which looks at the mind in terms of information processing. ! According to functionalists, there is no reason why machines or non-human organisms might not have minds, as long as their mental processes are of the right kind.

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The Mind Body Problem What is the place of minds in the physical universe? Minds are real but non-physical things. dualism “Minds” are really just ways of talking about what intelligent creatures do. behaviorism Minds are nothing but brains. mind/brain identity theory Minds are programs running on brains or some other kind of hardware. functionalism

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The Case for Dualism

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The Case for Dualism Rene Descartes 1596 – 1650

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The Case for Dualism Rene Descartes 1596 – 1650 Minds and bodies are so fundamentally different that they must be made of entirely different kinds of stuff.

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The Case for Dualism Rene Descartes 1596 – 1650 Minds and bodies are so fundamentally different that they must be made of entirely different kinds of stuff. Although dualism is an ancient theory, Rene Descartes is its most well-known defender. He did not just take for granted the existence of an immaterial soul (also called a mind) but argued for it explicitly.

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The Case for Dualism Rene Descartes 1596 – 1650 Whatever we can conceive of as being separate can actually exist separately. We can conceive of minds without bodies and bodies without minds. Thus minds and bodies can exist separately and hence dualism is true. Descartes’ ﬁrst argument

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The Case for Dualism Whatever we can conceive of as being separate can actually exist separately. We can conceive of minds without bodies and bodies without minds. Thus minds and bodies can exist separately and hence dualism is true. Descartes’ ﬁrst argument Descartes argues that since he can doubt the existence of his body but not of his mind, the two must be metaphysically distinct.

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The Case for Dualism Material things take up space, are publicly accessible, interact with each other in physical ways. Mental things don’t take up space, are private, and interact with each other according to their meanings. It is completely unclear how these diﬀerent kinds of things could possibly be uniﬁed. Thus minds and bodies are really distinct kinds of things. Descartes’ second argument

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Objections to Dualism

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Objections to Dualism Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia 1618 – 1680

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Objections to Dualism Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia 1618 – 1680 If minds and bodies exist in separate realms and share no common features, how can they interact, which they obviously do?

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Objections to Dualism Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia 1618 – 1680 Elizabeth Palatine, Princess of Bohemia, was one of many people with whom Descartes exchanged letters. She is most well-known for taking his dualistic philosophy of mind to task in her letters to him, by pointing out that on his view there was no easy way to explain how minds and bodies could possibly interact.

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Objections to Dualism Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia 1618 – 1680 ! It is clear that minds and bodies interact.

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Objections to Dualism Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia 1618 – 1680 ! It is clear that minds and bodies interact. ! I may, for example, see a bear when walking in the woods, feel fear, and then plan and execute an escape. ! Dualism has no way of accounting for such an obvious and everyday interaction between mind and body.

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Objections to Dualism Gilbert Ryle 1900 – 1976

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Objections to Dualism Gilbert Ryle 1900 – 1976 A mind is best understood not as another “thing” in the world alongside of the physical things we we experience, but as a pattern of activity exhibited by organisms like us.

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Objections to Dualism Gilbert Ryle 1900 – 1976 Gilbert Ryle was a British philosopher and an early advocate of what has come to be known as “analytic philosophy” one of the major contemporary approaches to philosophy. He set out to show how many philosophical puzzles resulted from the misuse of language and how a proper analysis of language could dissolve these puzzles.

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Objections to Dualism Gilbert Ryle 1900 – 1976 ! Descartes has made a “category mistake” in granting the mind the status of a separate thing alongside of and somehow mysteriously connected with the body. ! This is similar to looking for the thing called “a desert” alongside the rocks, sand and cactus in Death Valley.

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The Case for Behaviorism

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The Case for Behaviorism J.B. Watson 1878 – 1958

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The Case for Behaviorism J.B. Watson 1878 – 1958 “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science.”

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The Case for Behaviorism J.B. Watson 1878 – 1958 J.B. Watson was one of the founders of modern psychology, although after he was ﬁred from an academic job on account of a personal scandal he spent the rest of his life working for an advertising agency. Behaviorists claimed that we need not talk about minds from an “internal,” ﬁrst-person standpoint, but instead can study minds exclusively by watching how various animals and humans responded to stimuli in controlled experiments.

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The Case for Behaviorism J.B. Watson 1878 – 1958 Inner mental states are unnecessary for talking about what organisms with “minds” actually do. Furthermore there is no publicly accessible evidence for such inner states. So minds are not sets of inner states, but are instead patterns of objectively describable behavior. an argument for behaviorism

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The Case for Behaviorism Inner mental states are unnecessary for talking about what organisms with “minds” actually do. Furthermore there is no publicly accessible evidence for such inner states. So minds are not sets of inner states, but are instead patterns of objectively describable behavior. an argument for behaviorism This argument is not valid since from the fact that we need not mention “inner states” to describe minds, it does not follow that such states do not exist.

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Objections to Behaviorism

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Objections to Behaviorism Hilary Putnam 1926 –

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Objections to Behaviorism Hilary Putnam 1926 – Is being in some mental state or other really the same thing as exhibiting certain behaviors?

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Objections to Behaviorism Hilary Putnam 1926 – Hilary Putnam is an inﬂuential American philosopher who is highly critical of behaviorist approaches to the mind. He also has done important work in philosophical logic and the theory of meaning.

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Objections to Behaviorism Hilary Putnam 1926 – ! We can imagine a race of Super-Spartans who have trained themselves not to respond to bodily injuries.

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Objections to Behaviorism Hilary Putnam 1926 – ! We can imagine a race of Super-Spartans who have trained themselves not to respond to bodily injuries. ! Clearly they may very well be in pain even though they exhibit no behaviors normally associated with being in pain.

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Objections to Behaviorism Hilary Putnam 1926 – ! Someone might exhibit all of the signs of being in love such as talking about someone all of the time, buying them ﬂowers, etc.

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Objections to Behaviorism Hilary Putnam 1926 – ! Someone might exhibit all of the signs of being in love such as talking about someone all of the time, buying them ﬂowers, etc. ! And yet this person could be faking it, wishing only to marry the person they are courting for their money. ! Once again behaviorists would miss this important diﬀerence – they confuse outwards signs of a state with the state itself.

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The Case for Mind/Brain Identity Theory

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The Case for Mind/Brain Identity Theory J.C.C. Smart 1920 – 2012

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The Case for Mind/Brain Identity Theory J.C.C. Smart 1920 – 2012 “There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents.”

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The Case for Mind/Brain Identity Theory J.C.C. Smart 1920 – 2012 J.J.C. Smart was a British philosopher who wanted to explain the mind in purely physical terms, since he thought it absurd that everything except minds had such a physical explanation.

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The Case for Mind/Brain Identity Theory J.C.C. Smart 1920 – 2012 Neuroscience reveals that particular mental states are correlated with particular brain states. There is no reason to think that mental states are something non-physical. Thus mental states are nothing but brain states. an argument for mind/brain identity theory

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The Case for Mind/Brain Identity Theory Neuroscience reveals that particular mental states are correlated with particular brain states. There is no reason to think that mental states are something non-physical. Thus mental states are nothing but brain states. an argument for mind/brain identity theory This argument is an appeal to Ockham’s razor, or the principle that our explanations should not rely on extra entities that do no explanatory work. If we do not need to talk about mental states in addition to brain states, we should just eliminate talk of the former.

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Jerry Fodor 1935 –

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Jerry Fodor 1935 – Can’t it be the case that many diﬀerent particular brain states might realize one and the same mental state?

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Jerry Fodor 1935 – Jerry Fodor is an American philosopher who has greatly contributed to the philosophy of mind. He opposes attempts to reduce mental phenomena to something non-mental and so defends the autonomy of psychology and its independence from neuroscience.

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Jerry Fodor 1935 – ! The brains of individuals diﬀer in their small-scale structure, even if the overall anatomy of the brain is similar in humans.

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Jerry Fodor 1935 – ! The brains of individuals diﬀer in their small-scale structure, even if the overall anatomy of the brain is similar in humans. ! Yet in spite of these diﬀerences we can think the same thoughts such as “ 2 is an irrational number,” which means the same for all of us.

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Frank Jackson 1943 –

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Frank Jackson 1943 – No matter how much we know about minds and brains from outside, without knowledge of what it is like to have certain experiences from inside, our picture of the mind will not be complete.

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Frank Jackson 1943 – Frank Jackson is an Australian philosopher who argues against “physicalism” or the idea that we can account for everything there is in the universe in purely physical terms.

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Frank Jackson 1943 – ! Imagine a neuro-scientist named Mary who knows everything about color vision, but who herself lacks color vision.

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Objections to Mind/Brain Identity Theory Frank Jackson 1943 – ! Imagine a neuro-scientist named Mary who knows everything about color vision, but who herself lacks color vision. ! Even though Mary knows everything about the physical brain states involved in color vision she lacks some knowledge about it – what it is like to see color.

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The Case for Functionalism

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The Case for Functionalism Jerry Fodor 1935 –

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The Case for Functionalism Jerry Fodor 1935 – Mind is to software as brain is to hardware.

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The Case for Functionalism Jerry Fodor 1935 – What distinguishes minds, according to Fodor and other functionalists, is not so much what they are made of but what they do – they process information.

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The Case for Functionalism Jerry Fodor 1935 – Having a mind enables an organism to respond intelligently to stimuli. Intelligent responses are sensitive to the informational content of stimuli. Thus minds are best understood in terms of their ability to process information and mental states are computational states. an argument for functionalism

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The Case for Functionalism Having a mind enables an organism to respond intelligently to stimuli. Intelligent responses are sensitive to the informational content of stimuli. Thus minds are best understood in terms of their ability to process information and mental states are computational states. an argument for functionalism Like behaviorists functionalists claim that having a mind is to be understood as having certain capacities. Unlike behaviorists, functionalists claim that “inner mental states” can’t be dispensed with in a scientiﬁc study of the mind.

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The Case for Functionalism Having a mind enables an organism to respond intelligently to stimuli. Intelligent responses are sensitive to the informational content of stimuli. Thus minds are best understood in terms of their ability to process information and mental states are computational states. an argument for functionalism Functionalists claim that minds are “multiply realizable” in that the sets of functions performed by our brains and senses could in principle be carried out by a suitably programmed machine made of other materials.

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Objections to Functionalism

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Objections to Functionalism Ned Block 1942 –

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Objections to Functionalism Ned Block 1942 – It makes no sense to say that a mind is nothing but a set of functions running in the brain.

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Objections to Functionalism Ned Block 1942 – Ned Block is an American philosopher who has argued against the adequacy of the functionalist conception of the mind.

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Objections to Functionalism Ned Block 1942 – ! Suppose the population of China mimicked the human brain with each person playing the role of a single nueron in communication with others via walkie-talkie. ! Suppose that all of these people modeled the activity of a real brain. ! Such a functional equivalent of a brain with a mind clearly lacks a conscious mind, and so there must be more to having a mind than performing a set of functions.

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Objections to Functionalism Block’s China brain intends to show that there must be more to a mind than its programming. What might this extra ingredient be?

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Objections to Functionalism David Chalmers 1966 –

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Objections to Functionalism David Chalmers 1966 – No matter how much we know about minds and brains from outside, without knowledge of what it is like to have certain experiences from inside, our picture of the mind will not be complete.

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Objections to Functionalism David Chalmers 1966 – David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher who has written extensively on the diﬃculties involved in explaining one of the distinctive features of minds – consciousness. He often argues that all attempts to explain minds in purely physical terms must fail to leave consciousness out of the picture.

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Objections to Functionalism David Chalmers 1966 – ! Imagine a being just like me in terms of its behavior and the way it processes information, but with no consciousness – a philosophical zombie.

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Objections to Functionalism David Chalmers 1966 – ! Imagine a being just like me in terms of its behavior and the way it processes information, but with no consciousness – a philosophical zombie. ! If such a being is conceivable, then functionalist accounts of minds leave something out. ! Such beings are conceivable, even if they do not actually exist, so functionalism leaves something out of our account of the mind.

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The Case for Artiﬁcial Intelligence

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The Case for Artiﬁcial Intelligence Alan Turing 1912 – 1954

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The Case for Artiﬁcial Intelligence Alan Turing 1912 – 1954 A computer is a universal machine, which can in principle be programmed to carry out any ﬁnite task.

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The Case for Artiﬁcial Intelligence Alan Turing 1912 – 1954 Alan Turing was one of the pioneers of the computer age. He proved the possibility of a machine that could be programmed to carry out any task that could be described as a series of individual steps, and he helped build computing machines to crack German codes during WWII.

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The Case for Artiﬁcial Intelligence Alan Turing 1912 – 1954 ! In principle there is no reason a computer couldn’t be programmed to behave intelligently.

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The Case for Artiﬁcial Intelligence Alan Turing 1912 – 1954 ! In principle there is no reason a computer couldn’t be programmed to behave intelligently. ! To see whether a machine is intelligent we give it a simple test, “The Turing Test:” if a person cannpot tell the diﬀerence between its answers to our questions and humans answers it should count as intelligent.

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The Case for Artiﬁcial Intelligence Alan Turing 1912 – 1954 If intelligence is nothing but a kind of fancy programming carried out by human brains, there is no reason we shouldn’t be able to build an intelligent machine at some point.

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Against Artiﬁcial Intelligence

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Against Artiﬁcial Intelligence John Searle 1935 –

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Against Artiﬁcial Intelligence John Searle 1935 – Merely manipulating symbols is not the same thing as thinking.

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Against Artiﬁcial Intelligence John Searle 1935 – John Searle is an American philosopher who has written extensively on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. He has always been critical of the idea that a machine can have a mind.

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Against Artiﬁcial Intelligence John Searle 1935 – ! Imagine a room in which there is a person who does not speak Chinese, but who has an instruction manual for responding to Chinese symbols passed in through a window. ! This manual is like a program, designed to make the person using it look like she understands Chinese to a Chinese speaker passing written symbols into the room.

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Against Artiﬁcial Intelligence John Searle 1935 – Searle’s Chinese room example is intended to show that Artiﬁcial Intelligence is impossible – since a system like the Chinese Room, with an information processor like the person with the manual, that is programmed to respond to language like a computer might be programmed lacks understanding, an important part of intelligence.