Chinese Room argument
a philosophical argument claiming that computers or symbol-processing systems can receive and produce only syntactical streams of ordered signs and not semantic information. The name derives from a thought experiment in which a monolingual English speaker in a sealed room attempts to organize streams of Chinese characters into correct sequences, using only a set of rules of Chinese syntax provided by a computer program, and sends these sequences to a Chinese-speaking recipient outside the room. Success at this task produces an exchange that to the recipient is meaningful conversation but that to the English speaker is an exercise in mastering Chinese syntax; like the computer program that generated the syntactical instructions, the English speaker still has no understanding of the meaning of Chinese. The Chinese Room argument is intended as a challenge to conclusions about the significance of passing the Turing test: A computer program that successfully simulated
intelligent data (such as syntactical rules) would pass this test, but such a simulation is not the same as actual human intelligence and thought. [proposed by U.S. philosopher John R. Searle (1932– ) ]