The question of whether or not a machine is capable of intelligent, human-like thought is one that has plagued philosophers and scientists for centuries. Descartes considered the question in 1673 and determined that the sign of intelligence is the ability to understand language, and
indeed today, a machine’s ability to understand language is the standard against which we test its capacity for thought within a machine. Father of modern computer science, Alan Turing, formalized this standard, creating what is now referred to as the Turing Test. The Turing Test involves two humans and a computer. One human questions the other human and the computer, and attempts to distinguish which responses belong to the computer and which belong to the human. If the interrogator is unable to accurately distinguish the computer from the human, then the computer is said to pass the Turing Test. Many people believe that a computer could be built that is capable of passing the Turing Test and thus exhibits thought just as the human mind does. These people are proponents of strong artificial intelligence. American philosopher John Searle attempted, in his 1980 article “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” to prove that a computer running a program does not enable the computer to understand language, and thus no real intentionality is being exhibited through the computer’s ability to manipulate language effectively. At the core of his argument is the thought experiment, known as the Chinese Room. Searle asks us to imagine a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese, with the ability to take Chinese characters as input and, following a set of rules, output appropriate Chinese characters. This computer performs its task so convincingly that it easily passes the Turing Test, and so supporters of strong artificial intelligence conclude that the computer understands Chinese just as a fluent speaker does.
May
29