this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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This is exactly Searle's point. Whatever the room is doing, it is not the same as what humans do.
If you accept that, then the rest is semantics. You can call what the room does "intelligent" or "understanding" if you want, but it is fundamentally different from "human intelligence" or "human understanding".
He fails to show that. All he has shown that the human+room-system is something different than just the human by itself. Well, doh, nobody ever assumed otherwise. Running a NES emulator on my modern x86-64 CPU is something different from running an original NES too. That doesn't mean that the emulator is more or less capable than the real NES or that the underlying rules driving the emulator are different from the real thing. You have to actually test the systems and find ways in which they differ. Searle's experiments utterly fails here.
It's more than that. He says that all Turing machines are fundamentally the same as the Chinese room, and therefore no Turing machine will ever be capable of "human understanding".
Alternately, if anyone ever builds a machine that can achieve "human understanding", it will not be a Turing machine.