John Searle

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how John Searle has shown himself to be one of the most important philosopher's of mind and language of the last fifty years and how he also has an exceptionally strange place among the pantheon of the hallowed philosophers within this field. It explores how this strange place has do with the fact that Searle's skepticism has led him into an intense and heated debate with many other philosophers about the possibility of actually creating an effective artificial intelligence based on several inherent facts about the very nature on consciousness itself.

From the Paper:

"What, exactly, however, is the problem as created in Searle's Chinese Box? Well, part of the main problem, as he contends it from the very outset, lies in the fact that computers and human minds function on a completely different level. To begin with, he points out that computers behave according to set of "syntactical" rules, very much like grammar in language, and these are the sort of rules that exist in computer programming. He agrees with the point that the human mind must also have a syntactical component, but he disagrees very deeply with the notion that the syntactical component is all that exists in human minds, because he argues that, unlike machines, human minds have an inherent semantic component that generates meanings as well."

More papers on John Searle:

• Essay # 138150 : "Rebuttals to Searle’s Chinese Room Argument"
• Research Paper # 55451 : "Searle's Criticism of Materialism"
• Essay # 91088 : "Searle's Chinese Room Argument"

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