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Revisiting the Chinese Room: Boden’s Reply considered by Clarton Fambisai Mangadza A mini-dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Magister Artium (Philosophy) by Coursework in the FACULTY OF HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG Johannesburg January 2017 Supervisor: Prof CF Botha Re- Visiting the Chinese Room: Boden’s Reply considered Clarton Fambisai Mangadza Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Justification ............................................................................................................. 3 1.2. Outline .................................................................................................................... 4 2. Literature Review ......................................................................................................................... 5 3. Essential Concepts and Background ........................................................................................ 7 3.1. Functionalism .......................................................................................................... 7 3.2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) .......................................................................................... 8 3.3. Intelligence .............................................................................................................. 9 3.4. The Turing Test ....................................................................................................... 9 3.5. Digital Computer ................................................................................................... 11 3.6. Computers as Intelligent ........................................................................................ 11 4. Searle and the Chinese Room argument ............................................................................... 12 4.1. Strong Artificial Intelligence (AI) ............................................................................ 12 4.2. Weak Artificial Intelligence (AI) .............................................................................. 13 4.3. The Chinese Room Argument in Focus ................................................................. 13 5. Replies to Searle .................................................................................................................... 14 5.1. The Replies in Brief ............................................................................................... 14 6. Interrogating Boden’s Reply to Searle ................................................................................ 21 6.1. Interrogating Boden’s critique of Searle’s Positive Claim – Intentionality must be Biologically Grounded .................................................................................................. 23 6.1.1. Searle’s claim that intentionality is biologically grounded depends on bad analogies ..................................................................................................................... 25 6.1.2. My Objections to Boden’s attack on Searle’s Analogy ........................................ 27 6.1.3. Searle’s claim that intentionality is biologically grounded depends on unreliable intuitions ...................................................................................................................... 30 6.1.4. My Reply to Boden’s attack on Searle’s Intuition Claim ...................................... 32 6.2. Interrogating the “Negative” Claim: Formal-computational theories cannot explain understanding .............................................................................................................. 33 6.2.1. The First Prong: Attacking the Chinese Room argument via the Robot Reply .... 35 6.2.2. The Second Prong: Syntax versus Semantics and the English reply .................. 41 7. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 63 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................... 66 Acknowledgements To my supervisor Prof. Catherine F. Botha: for your patience and hard work, I am deeply grateful. As for your generosity with time, your engaging comments, your support and guidance throughout the marathon of writing this mini-dissertation, suffice it to say, NDINOTENDA ZVIKURU MWARI VAKUKOMBOREREYI! The journey has been rewarding, difficult at times but the support of my family, friends, my fellow students and staff from Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg has been a source of resilience; your support is acknowledged. THANK YOU ALL i Re- Visiting the Chinese Room: Boden’s Reply considered Clarton Fambisai Mangadza 1. Introduction [T]he point is not that the computer gets only to the 40-yard line and not all the way to the goal line. The computer doesn’t even get started. It is not playing the game (Searle 1990: 31). John Rogers Searle’s famous Chinese Room argument asks us to imagine Searle as a person who cannot speak or read Chinese, locked in a room with two openings - one to allow inputs and the other opening for outputs. Searle is equipped with a list of rules that are written in English (Searle in Boden 1990: 69) that explain how to manipulate Chinese characters. Since he does not understand Chinese the characters are all “meaningless squiggles” (ibid.) to him. The characters are in fact Chinese text and constitute questions coming in from the input opening. Using the rules, Searle can manipulate the characters and produce a reply in Chinese to every question in Chinese that comes through the opening. The replies that he produces are so good that no one can tell that he is not a native Chinese speaker. As Searle says, “…my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from any answer that a native Chinese speaker would give” (ibid.). Searle’s argument is that despite this, the person in the Chinese room cannot claim to understand Chinese, or said otherwise, the manipulation of syntactic rules does not imply an understanding of meaning or semantics. This thought experiment is claimed to have significant implications for both the philosophy of artificial intelligence and the philosophy of mind. Specifically, David Cole (2014) points out that the “narrow” conclusion of Searle’s argument is that a digital computer programmed in a certain way may appear to understand language, but it does not have any real understanding. This would prove the “Turing Test”1 inadequate. Cole (ibid.) also claims that the “broader” conclusion of the argument is to refute the theory that human minds are computer-like information processing systems. For Searle, minds result from biological processes and machines can only simulate these processes. 1 A more detailed explanation of the Turing test (named after Alan Turing) will follow under the section in which I discuss “Essential Concepts” since the Chinese Room is often depicted as a logical objection to the Turing test. 1 Re- Visiting the Chinese Room: Boden’s Reply considered Clarton Fambisai Mangadza Searle’s Chinese room argument has generated many replies, one of which is known as the Systems Reply.2 This reply acknowledges that Searle in the room does not understand Chinese, but then claims that he is in fact a part in a larger system that does. The larger system is comprised of the enormous database of symbols, the memory (scratchpads), and the set of rules that Searle uses to manipulate the symbols he receives. The whole system is needed for Searle to answer the Chinese questions, and not just Searle himself. So, the Systems reply is the claim that even though the man running the program does not understand Chinese, the system as a whole does. There are several philosophers who have contributed to the Systems reply, including Jack Copeland, John Haugeland and Stevan Harnad. Margaret Ann Boden also develops a reply of this sort, and it is her specific “English reply” (1988: 242) that will be the focus of this mini-dissertation. My intention is to critically evaluate whether Boden’s position, as set out in her paper “Escaping from the Chinese Room” constitutes a cogent argument against Searle’s standpoint – the argument that the Chinese Room, disproves the claim of strong AI, when considering her treatment of what she calls his “positive” and “negative” claims (Boden 1988: 240). It is important to note that this paper “Escaping from the Chinese Room” (1990) is a summarised version of her chapter “Is Computational Psychology