Structure
- Programs are entirely statistical
- Minds have semantics
- Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient for, semantics
- Therefore programs are not minds (QED)
- You are alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door.
- You understand nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, you send appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.Â
- The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding.
Abstract
If I do not understand Chinese solely on the basis of implementing a computer program for understanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis, because no digital colter has anything I do not have.