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Zombie Mouse in a Chinese Room

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Abstract

John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (CRA) purports to demonstrate that syntax is not sufficient for semantics, and, hence, because computation cannot yield understanding, the computational theory of mind, which equates the mind to an information processing system based on formal computations, fails. In this paper, we use the CRA, and the debate that emerged from it, to develop a philosophical critique of recent advances in robotics and neuroscience. We describe results from a body of work that contributes to blurring the divide between biological and artificial systems; so-called animats, autonomous robots that are controlled by biological neural tissue and what may be described as remote-controlled rodents, living animals endowed with augmented abilities provided by external controllers. We argue that, even though at first sight, these chimeric systems may seem to escape the CRA, on closer analysis, they do not. We conclude by discussing the role of the body–brain dynamics in the processes that give rise to genuine understanding of the world, in line with recent proposals from enactive cognitive science.

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Notes

  1. In what has become known as the standard interpretation of the Turing test, a human interrogator, interacting with two respondents via text alone, has to determine which of the responses is being generated by a suitably programmed computer and which is being generated by a human; if the interrogator cannot reliably do this then the computer is deemed to have passed the Turing test.

  2. In their work, Schank and Abelson used scripts to specify a detailed description of stereotypical events unfolding through time in given contexts.

  3. Cf. Rapaport (2006), Waskan (2005), Sprevak (2005), Richeimer (2004), Freeman (2003), (2004), Overill (2004), Garvey (2003), etc.

  4. In contrast to the thirteen basic ideographs deployed by Harré and Wang, IBM’s WATSON system—which recently won world wide acclaim as rivalling the greatest human players of the US TV game show ‘Jeopardy’—effectively deployed a complex high-level rule book (literally thousands of complex algorithms working in parallel) on the full gamut of natural human language.

  5. A CPU is the core component of a computer system that executes program instructions (its algorithm or rule book) by physically, and in most modern computers typically electronically, fetching or storing (reading or writing) them to and from memory and evaluating their coded commands.

  6. “Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself is it sufficient for, semantics”, Searle (1992).

  7. A closely allied position is also endorsed by Horgan and Tienson (2002).

  8. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk.

  9. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5u2IWFNFDE.

  10. Unless the imposed behaviours happened to exactly synchronise with natural behaviours appropriate to the rodent, given all of its bodily needs and desires, at that point in time.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Dr. Tom Fröese for comments which helped improve this paper. Please note that, in the context of the ‘Computing, Philosophy and the Question of Bio-Machine Hybrids: 5th AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy’ [part of the 2012 Turing centenary AISB/IACAP Joint World Congress], elements of this work re-visit arguments first raised at the 2011 PT-AI conference, Thessaloniki. C.f. Vincent C. Müller (ed.), (2012), Theory and Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, (SAPERE; Berlin: Springer).

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Correspondence to Matthew C. Spencer.

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In this work, the term enactive cognitive science will be used to delineate theoretical approaches to cognition that emphasise perception as action encompassing, for example, Gibson’s “ecological approach”; Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s “embodied mind”; Nöe’s “action in perception” and O’Regan and Noë’s “sensorimotor account of vision”.

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Nasuto, S.J., Bishop, J.M., Roesch, E.B. et al. Zombie Mouse in a Chinese Room. Philos. Technol. 28, 209–223 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0150-2

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