The essence of the "Chinese room argument" Essay

The argument called "Chinese room" was proposed by John Searle and later reproduced in his other works. This argument is directed against the position of the philosophy of mind called functionalism. Elaborating, it may be noted that the argument was directed against the machine functionalism, or, as Searle points out, against the strong version of artificial intelligence.
The position of functionalism, research position in the field of artificial intelligence, lies in the fact that our mental states are considered as the functional state of the brain and of the organism as a whole. At that time, functionalism was a very progressive position before its appearance, materialistic philosophers have tried to identify mental states with physical states of the brain. Functionalists also argued that mental states do not have to be in the brain.
The essence of the "Chinese room argument" is as follows imagine that a person, who does not know the Chinese language, was placed in a separate room in which there are blocks with characters. This man does not know the characters, but does have the instructions in English, which tells how the cubes should be taken and what the dice have to issue in response to specific requests coming from outside.
Let's say you're doing some kind of inquiry, asking "How old are you," Man looks at the instructions in English, in the instructions it states that you must take a certain cube and put it in a certain place. If a person successfully manipulates these cubes, the output we will receive answers in Chinese, ie Chinese, who will be watching this experiment, see what the answer is generally meaningful. But the man himself will never know in this room, what he said, what he did he still will not understand Chinese.
It seems that the "Chinese Room" together with this person understands our questions and give meaningful answers. But the man himself does not understand anything.
If this conclusion seems fair, then this indicates that the presence of a simple operation is not enough for us to say that the object, which gives definitive answers, have some understanding of what he is doing, there is a consciousness, a certain mental states . In other words, the subject in the room operates on the level of syntax characters, puts them according to certain rules, semantic - semantic content of these signs - is not available to him. All this leads us to the conclusion that the unsatisfactory functionalist program as a whole.
Against this argument, put forward a number of different objections. For example, many point to the fact that the thought experiment we are talking about the functioning of the whole system, the whole room, in a sense, all the room we can attribute mental states, but they can not be ascribed to a particular person - it's just part of a specific machine. However, despite these objections, it must be admitted that Searle argument has made a significant contribution to the refutation of functionalism.