Real Robots and the Missing Thought-Experiment in the Chinese Room Dialectic

John Searle’s [19], [20] Chinese Room Argument (CRA) is arguably the 20th century’s greatest philosophical polarizer. On the one hand, as the years pass, his argument is looking more and more to be headed for philosophical immortality. (Consider the book you’re holding, published a full two decades after the argument’s debut.) On the other hand, a common attitude among Strong AIniks is that CRA is not only unsound, but silly, based as it is on a fanciful story (CR) far removed from the practice of AI — practice which is year by year moving ineluctably toward sophisticated robots that will once and for all silence CRA and its proponents. For example, John Pollock, a philosopher and Strong AInik who takes his OSCAR system to be a significant step toward such robots, writes:

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