Two Fundamental Flaws with Searle’s Chinese Room Thought Experiment in Minds, Brains, and Science.

First, Searle assumes that the rulebook in his postulated scenario, complex enough to answer any Chinese query convincingly, but not so complex so as to have intentional states  could actually be written, without giving any reason why this should be so.

Second, closer observation of his argument reveals an entirely unsupported double-standard: the fundamental assumption that the nature of humans is somehow intrinsically greater than that of machines is a crucial and unjustified part of his theory. Regardless of whether or not functionalism is an acceptable a theory of the mind, it is clear that Searle’s argument is, by itself, insufficient to trigger its downfall.

For the purpose of this argument, functionalism will be taken to mean the theory in which mental states are defined by the causal relations they have with inputs, other mental states, and behaviour1. If a potential mind in question receives certain inputs and produces certain outputs indistinguishable from those that we would associate with our own mental states, then the theory of functionalism would indeed ascribe to it mental states. A central consequence of this theory is the concept of Multiple Realisability. This would contend that, since it is only an entity’s function (and not its composition) that may credit it with thought, humans are not the only entities that can have cognitive states. Functionalism thus allows for the emergence of what Searle calls strong artificial intelligence2, the notion that a computer with the right program can be said to actually understand something, and hence be able to hold mental states.

In Minds, Brains, and Science, Searle directly confronts functionalism by strongly objecting to the idea held in Multiple Realisability that a program might attain mental states; he insists that any mental states one might ascribe to such a program are mere “illusions”3. In support of his objection, Searle provides a nomologically possible thought experiment: explained briefly, he imagines a man who has no understanding of Chinese4 characters locked in a room and fed written Chinese stories, and returning written Chinese responses according to a highly complex instruction manual.

It must be stressed that, though his responses are deemed to be indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers – and the system could easily pass the Turing Test – the man merely manipulates formal symbols, of which he has no comprehension, according to the rulebook. Searle rightly asserts that the man does not “understand a word of Chinese stories”5. However, he then goes on to state that, analogously, a computer program can never by itself hold understanding, or any other cognitive state.