John Rogers Searle (1932)
He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and is
noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and
consciousness, on the characteristics of socially constructed versus physical
realities, and on practical reason.
John Searle is very well known for his development of a thought experiment,
called the "Chinese room" argument. He set out to prove that human thought was
not simply computation. His main premise is that a computational process in
itself cannot have an "understanding" of events and processes. Searle tried to
show how computers do not have to understand things like a language to process
information. In his theory, Searle describes a scenario in which a person is
isolated in a room. The individual receives pieces of paper marked with Chinese
characters from under the door. Even though the person does not understand
Chinese, if there is a formal sorting process for the characters then they can
be filled into a meaningful order. The room is supposed to be an analogy for the
computer.
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