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Connectionism, Chinese rooms, and intuition pumps

Posted on:2015-06-03Degree:M.AType:Thesis
University:Oklahoma State UniversityCandidate:Carver, MichaelFull Text:PDF
GTID:2475390020951829Subject:Philosophy
Abstract/Summary:
John Searle's famous Chinese Room argument is perhaps the most well-known attack on computational views of mind. At the center of this argument is a thought experiment in which the reader (thinker) is lead to an intuition that computational models of mind are deeply flawed due to their syntactic (or formal) nature. In this paper, I argue that the resulting intuition of this thought experiment is dampened when the 'Classical' program contained in the original thought experiment is replaced with a 'Connectionist' program. The resulting thought experiment - The Korean Room - helps show that the intuitive results of Searle's 'intuition pump' can change as a result of relatively small changes in what we're asked to imagine.
Keywords/Search Tags:Intuition, Thought experiment
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