Is to write a three-page essay is which you explain how two forms of diversity (e.g., cultural intellectual or
linguistic) are impacting the American educational system.
In this sense, by creating and running a program, if the program can perform and respond in the same way as a human so as to be indistinguishable, then this would be creating a mind, as much to say that the computer given the right program can think and understand. Seale calls this Strong AI, in contrast with weak AI which is the view that computer models are a useful way of studying the human mind (this version acknowledging the similarities between computers and the mind but not accepting that a computer model could ever be a mind – just a model of one).
Searle uses an illustration – the Chinese room theory – to refute strong AI. The person standing in a room in his illustration is like the computer, and this person has a basket of symbols (‘the database’). He does not know Chinese, but is given a rule book explaining how to manipulate Chinese symbols (the ‘computer program’). He is handed Chinese symbols (‘the questions’) by the people outside the room (‘the programmers’) who do know Chinese, and he processes these symbols according to the rule book and hands them back (‘the answers’). At no time does he attach any meaning to the symbols – he never ‘understands’ Chinese, he only knows how to construct the symbols in the correct form and hand them back. To the people outside the room however, it would appear, indistinguishably, that he understands Chinese. Seale’s illustration aims to show that the computer does not really think, and he summarises his argument;
(Axiom 1) Computer programs are formal (synatic) – i.e. they manipulate symbols without any reference to meanings.
(Axiom 2) Human minds have mental contents (semantics).When we learn to speak, we don’t just get very good at putting a lot of sounds in the right order (like memorizing the Chinese rule book) – we attach meanings to the words and put them together in such a way as to express ourselves.
(Axiom 3) Searle argues that “syntax is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics” and so
(Conclusion 1) “programs are neither constitutive of nor sufficient for minds” (Searle, p.206).
He further argues that computer programs merely simulate reality – for example, a compute
