History
Gottfried Leibniz made a similar argument in 1714, using the thought experiment of expanding the brain until it was the size of a mill. Leibniz found it difficult to imagine that a "mind" capable of "perception" could be constructed using only mechanical processes. In 1974, Lawrence Davis imagined duplicating the brain using telephone lines and offices staffed by people, and in 1978 Ned Block envisioned the entire population of China involved in such a brain simulation. This thought experiment is called "the Chinese Nation" or "the Chinese Gym".
The Chinese room was introduced in Searle's 1980 paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It eventually became the journal's "most influential target article", generating an enormous number of commentaries and responses in the ensuing decades. David Cole writes that "the Chinese Room argument has probably been the most widely discussed philosophical argument in cognitive science to appear in the past 25 years".
Most of the discussion consists of attempts to refute it. "The overwhelming majority," notes BBS editor Stevan Harnad, "still think that the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong." The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as "the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false.".
Searle's paper has become "something of a classic in cognitive science," according to Harnad. Varol Akman agrees, and has described his paper as "an exemplar of philosophical clarity and purity".
Read more about this topic: Chinese Room
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)