Chinese Room - History

History

Gottfried Leibniz made a similar argument in 1714, using the thought experiment of expanding the brain until it was the size of a mill. Leibniz found it difficult to imagine that a "mind" capable of "perception" could be constructed using only mechanical processes. In 1974, Lawrence Davis imagined duplicating the brain using telephone lines and offices staffed by people, and in 1978 Ned Block envisioned the entire population of China involved in such a brain simulation. This thought experiment is called "the Chinese Nation" or "the Chinese Gym".

The Chinese room was introduced in Searle's 1980 paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It eventually became the journal's "most influential target article", generating an enormous number of commentaries and responses in the ensuing decades. David Cole writes that "the Chinese Room argument has probably been the most widely discussed philosophical argument in cognitive science to appear in the past 25 years".

Most of the discussion consists of attempts to refute it. "The overwhelming majority," notes BBS editor Stevan Harnad, "still think that the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong." The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as "the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false.".

Searle's paper has become "something of a classic in cognitive science," according to Harnad. Varol Akman agrees, and has described his paper as "an exemplar of philosophical clarity and purity".

Read more about this topic:  Chinese Room

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
    Stefan Zweig (18811942)

    The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)