Searle’s view on why machines can think and computers cannot as well as discuss his response to a common objection, and finally we shall critically evaluate his position.
To begin, we will start by discussing why Searle rejects the notion that commuters can think. Searle uses an analogy throughout his paper to demonstrate his point; his analogy is called the Chinese room example. Imagine someone being put into a room and given a paper filled with Chinese writing, the person in the room does not know anything about Chinese, not how to speak it, read it, or write it. However the person is now given another piece of paper with rules correlating English to the Chinese symbols. This is in assumption that the person in the room is fully literate in the English language. Then this person is given a second page of Chinese writing and another correlating English translation. This continues until the person in the room soon becomes able to predict what the translations are for the Chinese symbols. Now at this point to anyone outside the room it appears that the person inside understands Chinese perfectly, however the person does not know Chinese, but rather they can only choose the correct response to any given character with no idea of their meaning or significance. The person is just carrying out a manipulation like a computer program.
A common rebottle to this analogy is that this is no different than speaking your first language, just associating the correct response to certain combination of words that are read, in his case English, however you are able to understand the meaning of the words you just saw along with associations with them. For example you can distinguish a fast car or a boring gold fish, or a striped zebra. If you understand English you can fully understand what is fast, boring, and striped, and then relate this to other things. When you are in the Chinese room you do not understand what the Chinese characters are on the paper or the meaning behind them, all you do is follow a correlation sheet. There is no thinking being done by the computer but rather only a programmed process. This is like the example Searle gives, “If you type into a computer “2 plus 2 equals?” it will type out “4.” But it has no idea that “4” means 4 or that it means anything at all” This shows that the computer has no idea what it is doing other then what it has been programmed to do. When the computer answers “4” although the answer is right the computer has not thought since it doesn’t know what it just did. Rather, a person can understand what 2 plus 2 means, they can realize what they are doing and associate things with it. It can be 2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges, a thinking human can apply this anywhere, where the computer cannot, it is confined to the realm in which it was programmed.
Now let’s discuss why Searle believes that only a machine can think. To properly understand this we must first unpack why humans can think. In this quote Searle explains his reasoning as to why a human is capable of thinking “…it is because I am a certain sort of organism with a certain biological (i.e., chemical and physical) structure, and this structure under certain conditions, is causally capable of producing perception, actions, and understanding, learning, and other intentional phenomena.” This explains that Searle sees humans to be capable of thinking because of our bodily make up. The chemicals in our body along with the physical organs of our body make us the thinking beings we are. For Searle this is the only way that thinking can be achieved. So why does Searle believe that machines can think? He believes this based on his definition of machine, he sees the human body to be a machine. When asked the question could a machine think Searle responded “The answer is, obviously, yes. We are precisely such machines” Only very special machines can think and those machines are brains. What has to be made clear here is the distinction made by Searle between a computer and a machine, they are both different and not to be confused.
The only way artificial intelligence can be created by humans is if it exists on a system equal to our own, but made by the hand of man. When responding to the question if a man made machine could ever think, Searle bluntly says “Assuming it is possible to produce artificially a machine with a nervous system, neurons with axon and dendrites, and all the rest of it, sufficiently like ours, again the answer to the question seems to be obviously yes.” If this can be created then for Searle a thinking machine would work because this brain would be able to produce intentionality for understanding, meaning, and decision making. As seen in the Chinese room example, when you add a person to the room with intentionality, but subjugate them to an input output programmed process, like the internal workings of a computer, this process adds no further intentions to the person in the room “it adds nothing, for example, to a man’s ability to understand Chinese.”
One of the most telling objections that arise from Searle’s view is the Combination reply.
This objection is the sum of the systems reply, the robot reply, and the brain simulator reply. This is a powerful objection because it incorporates three other objections and combines them into one. When all combined the objection asks you too “imagine a robot with a brain shaped computer lodged in its cranial cavity, imagine the computer programmed with all the synapses of a human brain, imagine the whole behavior of the robot is indistinguishable, from human behavior, and now think of the whole thing as a unified system and not just as a computer with inputs and outputs.” In essence this robot would be indistinguishable from human beings for the most part. According to Searle indeed the robot would seem like a functioning person by viewing its behavior it would just be assumed that the robot thinks and has intentions in similar ways as humans. Now if it was known that this person was indeed a robot we would no long place those assumption upon it and realize that it is indeed programmed and thus has no intentionality so it cannot think. Searle continues, to compare this to the Chinese room analogy once again, imagine a person, not in the room, but in this robots brain who cannot see anything outside. All the input data from the sensory receptors would be sent, currently uninterpreted, to the person who would then manipulate it, via a set of rules, and send out the data to the motor functions of the robot. Now like a computer has no clue of what it is doing when it processes information, let’s imagine that the person inside the brain space of this robot has no idea of what they are translating these symbols for. At this point clearly the robot is not doing any thinking at all “The hypothesis that the dummy has a mind would now be unwarranted and unnecessary” Since the person inside is just manipulating symbols following a set of rules there is no intentionality,
there is no thinking.
Searle seems to base his whole discussion on the one idea that you can only achieve thinking with “brains and machines that have the same causal powers as brains.” Given the date that this paper was written I can understand perhaps the views being slightly different then they are now toward AI, however I cannot say for sure since I was not yet in existence at the time. The reason I bring this up is because recently in the past year Elon Musk, the Tony Stark of reality, has made public comments about the dangers of AI and how quick it can exponentially grow in terms of intelligence. He mentioned that “‘digital super intelligences’ and internet bots as being among the potential problems facing humanity.” What pops out at me here is the relation between artificial intelligences and the internet. This is AI over a technology that is not replicating the human brain. Furthermore he goes on to say that “the risk of ‘something seriously dangerous happening’ could be in as few as five years.” This means that clearly he knows something that is going on that has not been made public yet and he is fearful of it. My assumption reading this is that most likely this AI is taking place over mechanical form and not biological or artificially built biological as Searle says it has to be. I do think that over time there will be development allowing computers to have the ability to think and rationalize and to gain intentionality. Currently the computers we all have and work with whether they are our desktops or phones or tablets cannot think and I do believe that Searle is successful with his argument to prove that. However his argument does not stand up to the future promise of technological development. With that being said I do not believe myself nor Searle can make educated claims about this but rather it be dependent upon our computer engineers and scientists who know how these machines work inside and out. These people know how to manipulate computers to achieve a certain outcome. They can engineer a new type of computer hardware, code, and processes to potentially enable AI. But it is them and them alone who can create AI, and then all of us can see who was really right. In closing once again as computers exist as we know them today Searle is successful to prove that they cannot think but his argument in my opinion is certainly not future proof because of his restrictive bases on which he says AI can be built.