John Searle And The Combination Reply

In the last century we have seen modern technology grow from almost nothing into a leading power in our everyday lives. Technology aids us humans in so many different ways, and in all imaginable categories, that it would be impossible to list them all. One of the main technological advances that are used in almost every machine today, in some form or another, is a computer. Overtime the processing power of a computer has become immense, which started to beg the question can a computer ever think and or poses human like qualities and behaviors. John Searle does not believe that a computer can ever think because they do not have the intention to do so; however he believes that machines rather, could think. In this paper we will be discussing
This objection is the sum of the systems reply, the robot reply, and the brain simulator reply. This is a powerful objection because it incorporates three other objections and combines them into one. When all combined the objection asks you too “imagine a robot with a brain shaped computer lodged in its cranial cavity, imagine the computer programmed with all the synapses of a human brain, imagine the whole behavior of the robot is indistinguishable, from human behavior, and now think of the whole thing as a unified system and not just as a computer with inputs and outputs.” In essence this robot would be indistinguishable from human beings for the most part. According to Searle indeed the robot would seem like a functioning person by viewing its behavior it would just be assumed that the robot thinks and has intentions in similar ways as humans. Now if it was known that this person was indeed a robot we would no long place those assumption upon it and realize that it is indeed programmed and thus has no intentionality so it cannot think. Searle continues, to compare this to the Chinese room analogy once again, imagine a person, not in the room, but in this robots brain who cannot see anything outside. All the input data from the sensory receptors would be sent, currently uninterpreted, to the person who would then manipulate it, via a set of rules, and send out the data to the motor functions of the robot. Now like a computer has no clue of what it is doing when it processes information, let’s imagine that the person inside the brain space of this robot has no idea of what they are translating these symbols for. At this point clearly the robot is not doing any thinking at all “The hypothesis that the dummy has a mind would now be unwarranted and unnecessary” Since the person inside is just manipulating symbols following a set of rules there is no intentionality,