Thinking ability of a machine

Turing and Searle had two different opinions about the thinking ability of a machine. From Searle’s perspective, the computer functions solely on the defined elements and computational operations put into it and does not have an understanding of the information being fed into it. This implies that computers work perfectly when fed with the right input, running on designed programs and delivering expected output. He illustrated this using the Chinese room scenario. A bilingual speaker of English and French can understand the information on any document written in English or French. If the same person is given a document written in Chinese, he would not be able to comprehend the information on the document. However, if the Chinese document is accompanied with a set of instructions   written in English, the person will be able to decode the words written in the Chinese document based on the translation instruction, although he still cannot understand Chinese. So, from Searle’s perspective, the information man inputs in a computer does not imply the computer comprehends the information even though it can process the information. For example, the traffic light system is a computer that controls the traffic flow of many cars daily. However, a traffic light would not know what to do if a cow were to be at an intersection simply because man has not programmed it to work that way. In this regard, machines do not understand. Conversely, in Turing’s perspective, he believed that the mind and brain were no different i.e. they were the same thing. He believed the mind/brain is a physical object just like a digital computer. Turing believed that at birth, a person is an “unorganized machine” and by training the person begins to think and gets organized. Turing believed a person is taught how to think by going through a series of structured learning (program over a given period. So, from his view, since a person can be thought how to think, the digital computer also can be taught how to think. This he illustrated with his test involving an “imitation game,” whereby a remote human interrogator must distinguish between the computer and human subjects based on their replies to various questions. One of Turing’s objective of conducting this test was to demonstrate that if carefully developed, computers were capable of delivering human-level intelligent operations which could help convince people about his viewpoint.

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