The Theory Of Mind – Philosophy Notes – For W.B.C.S. Examination.
মনস্তত্ত্ব – দর্শন নোট – WBCS পরীক্ষা।
Functionalism was inspired in part by the development of the computer, which was understood in terms of the distinction between hardware, or the physical machine, and software, or the function that the computer performs. It also was influenced by the earlier idea of a Turing machine, named after the English mathematician Alan Turing. A Turing machine is an abstract device that receives information as input and produces other information as output, the particular output depending on the input, the internal state of the machine, and a finite set of rules that associate input and machine-state with output. Turing defined intelligence functionally, in the sense that for him anything that possessed the ability to transform information from one form into another, as the Turing machine does, counted as intelligent to some degree. This understanding of intelligence was the basis of what came to be known as the Turing test, which proposed that, if a computer could answer questions posed by a remote human interrogator in such a way that the interrogator could not distinguish the computer’s answers from those of a human subject, then the computer could be said to be intelligent and to think. Following Turing, the philosopher Hilary Putnam held that the human brain is basically a sophisticated Turing machine, and his functionalism was accordingly called “Turing machine functionalism.” Turing machine functionalism became the basis of the later theory known as strong artificial intelligence (or strong AI), which asserts that the brain is a kind of computer and the mind a kind of computer program.
In the 1980s Searle mounted a challenge to strong AI. Searle’s objections were based on the observation that the operation of a computer program consists of the manipulation of certain symbols according to rules that refer only to the symbols’ formal or syntactic properties and not to their semantic ones. In his so-called “Chinese-room argument,” Searle attempted to show that there is more to thinking than this kind of rule-governed manipulation of symbols. The argument involves a situation in which a person who does not understand Chinese is locked in a room. He is handed written questions in Chinese, to which he must provide written Chinese answers. With the aid of a computer program or a rule book that matches questions in Chinese with appropriate Chinese answers, the person could simulate the behaviour of a person who understands Chinese. Thus, a Turing test would count such a person as understanding Chinese. But by hypothesis, he does not have that understanding. Hence, understanding Chinese does not consist merely in the ability to manipulate Chinese symbols. What the functionalist theory leaves out and cannot account for, according to Searle, are the semantic properties of the Chinese symbols, which are what the Chinese speaker understands. In a similar way, the Turing-functionalist definition of thinking as the manipulation of symbols according to syntactic rules is deficient because it leaves out the symbols’ semantic properties.
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