烟霞Yanxia

往期Archive · 2022

中文屋The Chinese Room

The Chinese Room中文屋

烟霞第 17 期 · 2022 年Yanxia No. 17 · 2022

Can a machine think? Engineers, scientists, and philosophers have been pondering this question ever since the earliest days of computers. The Chinese Room is one of the most famous (notorious) thought experiments in this field, perhaps second only to Alan Turing’s Imitation Game. Proposed in Berkeley in 1980, the Chinese Room is directed against computationalist theory of mind, and a version of strong AI theory that claims that machines can indeed think. Some of the questions we will dive into: What happens in the Chinese Room? Four decades later, can we apply the same critique to today’s AI? How does the charge of computationalism hold up against today’s neural network based AI?

Can a machine think? Engineers, scientists, and philosophers have been pondering this question ever since the earliest days of computers. The Chinese Room is one of the most famous (notorious) thought experiments in this field, perhaps second only to Alan Turing’s Imitation Game. Proposed in Berkeley in 1980, the Chinese Room is directed against computationalist theory of mind, and a version of strong AI theory that claims that machines can indeed think. Some of the questions we will dive into: What happens in the Chinese Room? Four decades later, can we apply the same critique to today’s AI? How does the charge of computationalism hold up against today’s neural network based AI?