Can Machines Think? Turing and Searle

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a way to answer the question 'Can machines think?' He called it the Imitation Game. Instead of defining 'thinking'—which is philosophically messy—Turing focused on behavior. The test involves three players: a human judge, a human participant, and a machine. The judge communicates with both via text. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is the human and which is the machine, the machine is said to have passed the test. Turing’s core claim was that if a machine acts indistinguishable from a conscious being, we have no logical reason to deny that it is 'thinking.' This perspective is known as Functionalism: the mind is what the brain does, regardless of what it is made of.

Philosopher John Searle disagreed with Turing. In 1980, he proposed the Chinese Room thought experiment. Imagine you are locked in a room with a massive rulebook. People slide slips of paper with Chinese characters under the door. You don't know Chinese, but the rulebook tells you: 'If you see symbol $X$, write symbol $Y$.' You follow the rules and slide the response back. To the people outside, you seem to speak Chinese perfectly. However, you are just performing syntax (manipulating symbols) without any semantics (understanding meaning). Searle argues that computers are exactly like the person in the room: they follow programs ($if/then$ logic) but have no 'intentionality' or actual grasp of what the symbols represent.

The heart of the debate lies in the distinction between Syntax and Semantics. Syntax refers to the formal properties of symbols—their shapes and the rules for combining them (like the grammar of a sentence or the $0$s and $1$s of binary code). Semantics refers to the meaning or the 'aboutness' of those symbols. Searle’s famous syllogism is: 1. Programs are purely formal (syntactic). 2. Minds have mental contents (semantic). 3. Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics. Therefore, programs are not minds. This challenges the idea of Strong AI—the belief that an appropriately programmed computer actually is a mind, rather than just a simulation of one.