Searle's "
Chinese Room" argument tries to make the point that
machines are only capable of
manipulating formal symbols and are not capable of
real thought or
sentience. He is using this as a
rebuttal to the
Turing Test and others.
Searle says to imagine an English speaking American enclosed in a room. In this room, he has thousands of cards with Chinese characters printed on them. There are Chinese "computer users" outside feeding him input, in Chinese, through a slot. The person inside, in addition to the cards, also has an instruction booklet written in English telling him how to put together Chinese characters and symbols suitable for output.
So the person in the "Chinese Room" does this and uses his instructions to produce output that makes sense to the Chinese speakers on the outside. But that person still does not know Chinese himself! He just manipulated symbols in accordance to instructions he was given by a "programmer". He has no idea what the input or output means.
The rebuttal
While the person inside the box may not speak Chinese, the entire system does!
The rebuttal to the rebuttal
The entire system is only as smart as the instructions, AND, it does not have capability to learn! Because in order to learn, you must be able to modify the instructions - and to modify the instructions you need to understand them.
Learning is the essence of what makes us sentient, and when we learn we modify our instructions so to speak. Suppose someone fed this system a sentence in Chinese - first of all could he read it - it's easy enough to write Chinese sentences - but reading them is much harder.
Second suppose the "instructions" could read the sentence - could it act on what it says - remember the instructions have no prior programming to deal with the sentence - and it can't translate it to English for the American to think up - that's cheating.
In short unless computers ever manage to rewrite their own programs they could never be considered sentient. Because they would not have a true capability to learn.