Real Robots and the Missing Thought-Experiment in the Chinese Room Dialectic

Abstract

Abstract John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (CRA, see Searle 1980,11984) is arguably the twentieth century’s greatest philosophical polarizer. On the one hand, as the years pass, it looks more and more as if his argument is headed for philosophical immortality. (Consider the book you’re holding, published a full two decades after the argument’s debut.) On the other hand, a common attitude among Strong Alniks is that CRA is not only unsound, but silly, based as it is on a fanciful story (CR) far removed from the practice of AI, practice which is year by year moving ineluctably toward sophisticated robots that will once and for all silence CRA and its proponents.