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Rating: 
Summary: Trick philosophy
Review: The human brain evolved to assist the survival of its owner while the owner navigated the dangerous jungles and forests of ancient times. Its ability to extract patterns from the information provided by the retina and optic nerve is quite phenomenal. The process by which your brain is recognizing my words and understanding my meaning is astounding. Yet if you are asked to act like a computer by reading numbers, moving paper tape, erasing things and following instructions given on the paper tape, you will prove to be one of the slowest computers in the world. The original word `computer' referred to a man sitting in a room with paper, pencil and eraser. These human `computers' were replaced by machines a long time ago because they are too slow. In summary, humans are fast and intelligent at being humans but slow at being computers. In the Chinese Room Argument, John Searle states that although we have a human mind which could otherwise be used to understand Chinese, this particular human mind does not in fact understand it. Given this stipulation, the human mind's ability to process language cannot be used and the only method of "understanding Chinese" is left to the "Chinese room" which consists of a computer run by the very slowest of CPUs, the human being sans abacus, sans calculator, sans silicon chips and sans hope. The Chinese Room Argument is a trick argument that proves nothing. The computer room is so slow that it cannot ever think or understand Chinese. On the other hand, this doesn't say anything about whether a high-speed computer with the memory and processing power of the human brain might one day speak and understand Chinese quite well.
Rating:
Summary: Trick philosophy
Review: The human brain evolved to assist the survival of its owner while the owner navigated the dangerous jungles and forests of ancient times. Its ability to extract patterns from the information provided by the retina and optic nerve is quite phenomenal. The process by which your brain is recognizing my words and understanding my meaning is astounding. Yet if you are asked to act like a computer by reading numbers, moving paper tape, erasing things and following instructions given on the paper tape, you will prove to be one of the slowest computers in the world. The original word 'computer' referred to a man sitting in a room with paper, pencil and eraser. These human 'computers' were replaced by machines a long time ago because they are too slow. In summary, humans are fast and intelligent at being humans but slow at being computers. In the Chinese Room Argument, John Searle states that although we have a human mind which could otherwise be used to understand Chinese, this particular human mind does not in fact understand it. Given this stipulation, the human mind's ability to process language cannot be used and the only method of "understanding Chinese" is left to the "Chinese room" which consists of a computer run by the very slowest of CPUs, the human being sans abacus, sans calculator, sans silicon chips and sans hope. The Chinese Room Argument is a trick argument that proves nothing. The computer room is so slow that it cannot ever think or understand Chinese. On the other hand, this doesn't say anything about whether a high-speed computer with the memory and processing power of the human brain might one day speak and understand Chinese quite well.
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