A.I. and the Mind Part 4: The Chinese Room Argument and the Mind-Dependence of Computation

In this final episode in the series, we take aim at the most popular view of the mind among physical reductionists: the computational theory. Many today believe the mind is nothing more than a complex biological computer and that thinking is nothing more than running the right kind of program. The computational view of the mind is without question the greatest source of optimism for the project of reproducing human intelligence in a machine. But there are series problems with this view. We look at two from philosopher John Searle here. First there is the famous Chinese Room Argument and then the lesser known, but very powerful, argument that computation is itself a mind-dependent and observer-relative feature that is imposed from the outside and is not intrinsic to any physical system. Together these arguments show that any attempt to model the mind on a digital computer is bound to fail, and with it the greatest single hope for the prospects of building a truly intelligent machine.