Searle's Chinese Room and the Limits of Computation

John Searle presented the Chinese Room argument in "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980), directing it specifically against what he called "strong AI," the claim, closely associated with the computational theory of mind and the classical, symbol-manipulating tradition in artificial intelligence, that a computer program correctly implementing the right formal, syntactic operations on symbols thereby genuinely understands, or constitutes a mind with, the semantic content those symbols are used to represent — that appropriately programmed computation is not merely a model of a mind but is itself sufficient for having a mind, in exactly the sense that appropriately organized neurons are sufficient for a brain to think. Searle contrasts this with "weak AI," the comparatively modest and largely uncontroversial claim that computers can be a powerful tool for simulating and studying mental processes without literally possessing minds themselves.