The Chinese Room Argument

My philosophy paper

Is it possible for machines to develop consciousness? If a computer was programmed in a certain way, could the computer acquire a mind? David Chalmers argued that if he can prove that the answers to these questions is “Yes,” then strong artificial intelligence is an eventuality. Chalmers began his argument for strong AI, in his book The conscious mind (1996), by classifying all objections to artificial intelligence to two types. The first type is functional objections, where all objections of this form does not accept that computational system are similar to cognitive systems. For example, some argue that these systems follow rules only and doesn’t have creativity, so they can never have human like systems. However, these
Thus, Chalmers succeeded in proving that building artificial brains is possible. Still, he can’t equate artificial brain with artificial intelligence. Moreover, he didn’t answer the question of subjectivity (qualia) in the argument above. Though he did argue against Searle’s Chinese Room argument. In the following paragraphs I’ll briefly explain the Chinese Room argument, and how Chalmers responded to Searle.
Searle’s argument mainly prove that the Chinese room functional system lacks conscious states, in the same way that the conscious experience (subjective experience) of understanding Chinese. Searle’s believes that intentionality requires consciousness. And since the room lacks intentionality it can never be conscious. Chalmers argued that in order to falsify Searle’s argument, we need to factor out the problem of the link between consciousness and intentionality. Instead, he suggested to approach the problem solely in terms of consciousness, because the problem of the link between intentionality and consciousness is separate from Strong AI. To falsify Searle’s, Chalmers divided Searle’s argument to two parts. The first part is programs are not sufficient enough for consciousness (1). The second part of Searle’s argument is programs are not sufficient enough for intentionality (2). Chalmers said that
However, I bet that John Searle would respond to Chalmers’ argument as follows. First, assuming that it is acceptable to disregard the link between intentionality and consciousness in arguing for strong AI is a false premise. If the demon, in Chalmers’ argument, is conscious, he must possess intentionality. So to prove consciousness, a proof of intentionality is a requirement. Therefore, in Searle’s point of view Chalmers didn’t succeed to counter argue the argument against strong AI. Personally, I’m not convinced by Chalmers’ counter argument for two reasons. First, disregarding the link between intentionality and consciousness is not plausible to me. The second reason is the process of replacing each two demons with a demon that does functions as the two combined. Then repeating the process until you have one demon capable of all functions at once seems physically impossible. Two bodies, demons and neurons, with different physical properties can never possess an identical