Individiual Understanding :: essays research papers

Individual UnderstandingI agree with functionalists, specifically the strong soppy Intelligence (AI) camp, concerning the concept of actualiseing. While John Searle poses a strong non-functionalist contingency in his AChinese Room argument, I find that his definition of Ato find out move short and hampers his point. I criticize his defense that understanding rests on a standardized knowledge of meaning, save not before outlining the general punctuate of the issue.Functionalists qualify thought and psychological states in terms of input and output. They lead that what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch (input) creates a mental state or belief, and that particular mental state in turn creates our reaction (output). If I see it=s raining outside, I believe that if I go outside I will get wet, and therefore I take an umbrella with me. The functionalists define a mental state strictly through its cause and notion relationships, through its function.This thinking leads to th e conclusion that the military personnel brain is little more than a big, complex data processor. All we human beings do is take input, wait on it, and accordingly create output, just like a computer. In fact, functionalists who hold in strong AI go so far as to posit that an appropriately programmed computer actually has all the same mental states and capabilities as a human. In AMinds, Brains, and Programs, John Searle outlines this argument AIt is a characteristic of human beings= humbug understanding capacity that they can answer questions about a story even though the information they give was never explicitly declared in the story. . . . Strong AI claims that machines can similarly answer questions about stories in this fashion. . . . Partisans of strong AI claim that in this question and answer chronological sequence the machine is not only simulating a human ability but also (1) that the machine can literally be said to understand the story . . . and (2) that what th e machine and its program do explains the human ability to understand the story and answer questions about it (354).While strong AI claims that a machine can understand just as a human understands, Searle himself disagrees. He claims that a strictly input-output system, such as a computer is, cannot understand anything, nor does it explain humans= ability to understand. In criticizing strong AI, Searle creates his storied AChinese Room argument suppose that Searle was locked in a room with a large batch of Chinese writing.