John Serle's Chinese Room Experiment

I have written a paper that has been accepted as a regular research paper at a 2006 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI'06: June 26-29, 2006, Las Vegas, USA). The paper examines seldom discussed artifacts in John Searle's Chinese Room experiment - the instruction books and computer programs. This conference is one of 28 concurrent conferences running under the banner of "Worldcomp 06".

The paper came about from some thinking I did about how you can tell whether or not somthing like a computer can think?

Alan Turing suggested a quantitative test. He did so since he thought nobody could truly answer whether of not an entity can think - unless you were that entity.

Searle asks you to indeed be that entity and ask yourself whether or not you can 'understand'.

His test was to think about some program running in some computer that is said to be capable of thinking and understanding. It is receiving patterns that turn out to be Chinese symbols representing some question posed in Chinese. It answers the questions in Chinese.

Now imagine that same program translated into English instructions and given to some man ins a room who carries out all the instructions and indeed seems to be answering questions in Chinese - in Chinese. He now asks you to imagine you are that person - and asks whether you understand Chinese - or will ever understand Chinese. Most people imagining themselves in this position would reply no - they don't see how they would ever learn to understand Chinese. Searle is arguing against 'strong AI' that says the program 'understands' in the same way that a human 'understands'.

I propose a modification to the experiment. I then assume Searle's conditions to hold true - and ask what the program and instruction manual has to look like in order to keep Searle's conditions true. This leads to some insights about what is going on.

I also think that Turing's notion of a quantitative test is critical. All that we know in this universe if by 'observation'. We think we see a chair - but all we really receive is signals in our brain from which we form the concept of a chair.

In fact, current thinking by Wheeler ('it' from 'bit') and Zeilinger's Foundational Principle for Quantum Mechanics re-enforces my notion that 'measurement' when we ask whether or not something thinks, is essential.

I will have the paper published in the proceedings of this conference, and will have the paper and a slide show presentation up on my web site shortly.