Abstract
In Searle's critique of what he calls strong Artificial Intelligence (AI) — a critique which consists essentially of the Chinese room gedankenexperiment — he argues „that strong AI must be false, since a human agent could instantiate the program and still not have the appropriate mental states.“ It is shown that Searle's gedankenexperiment — which rests last of all on an (incorrect) identification of knowledge in general with explicit knowledge and the (incorrect) assumption that a mental system must be transparent for itself — does not exemplify what it pretends to — namely the structure of a system of strong AI —, since the Chinese room must necessarily possess properties which are by no means properties which a computer system must have necessarily to be a language processing AI system. Therefore, the Chinese room doesn't instantiate such a system and, therefore, the gedankenexperiment doesn't tell anything about the possibility or impossibility of strong AI.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Kanngießer, S. (1997). Inside and outside the Chinese room. In: Freksa, C., Jantzen, M., Valk, R. (eds) Foundations of Computer Science. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1337. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0052104
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0052104
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