Page "Consciousness" Paragraph 23

In a lively exchange over what has come to be referred to as " The Chinese room Argument ", John Searle sought to refute the claim of proponents of what he calls ' Strong Artificial Intelligence ( AI )' that a computer program can be conscious, though he does agree with advocates of " Weak AI " that computer programs can be formatted to " simulate " conscious states.

His own view is that consciousness has subjective, first-person causal powers by being essentially intentional due simply to the way human brains function biologically ; conscious persons can perform computations, but consciousness is not inherently computational the way computer programs are.

To make a Turing machine that speaks Chinese, Searle gets in a room stocked with algorithms programmed to respond to Chinese questions, i. e., Turing machines, programmed to correctly answer in Chinese questions asked in Chinese, and he finds he's able to process the inputs to outputs perfectly without having any understanding of Chinese, nor having any idea what the questions and answers could possibly mean.

And, this is all a current computer program would do.

If the experiment were done in English, since Searle knows English, he would be able to take questions and give answers without any algorithms for English questions, and he would be affectively aware of what was being said and the purposes it might serve: Searle passes the Turing test of answering the questions in both languages, but he's only conscious of what he's doing when he speaks English.

Another way of putting the argument is to say computational computer programs can pass the Turing test for processing the syntax of a language, but that semantics cannot be reduced to syntax in the way Strong AI advocates hoped: processing semantics is conscious and intentional because we use semantics to consciously produce meaning by what we say.