John R. Searle: Weak Artificial Intelligence

John R. Searle is an American philosopher and is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkley. John R. Searle became very well known due to his philosophy about whether computers truly have the ability to think like humans do. In his article, “Mind, Brains, and Programs”, Searle makes two different claims, the idea of weak artificial intelligence, and the idea of strong artificial intelligence. Weak artificial intelligence is essentially a grouping of computer programs, which need human input whereas strong artificial intelligence has the ability to think and have the same cognitive brain activity as humans do. Searle accepts the idea of weak artificial intelligence but on the other hand he rejects strong artificial intelligence
According to Searle weak artificial intelligence is a tool that helps us understand the human brain and to actually distinguish what consciousness is. Weak Artificial intelligence follows syntax, which is another word for computing and symbol manipulation. According to Searle strong Artificial Intelligence follows semantic, which is another word for meaning. Computers use syntax to solve and compute problems, whereas humans and strong artificial intelligence use semantics to think problems through and to find meaning in these problems. Searle says, “Any attempt literally to create intentionality artificially (strong AI) could not succeed just by designing programs but would have to duplicate the causal powers of the human brain.” (1) Weak Artificial Intelligence is meant to help our understanding of the human brain by computing different programs, whereas Strong Artificial Intelligence is theoretically much more than
The point that Searle brings up after this entire situation is that regardless of being given rules, or batches of writing the person still does not understand or know how to write in Chinese. Searle says that the person in the story has, “inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker, and can have any formal program he or she like, but still understand nothing. For the same reasons, Schank's computer understands nothing of any stories.” (3) This experiment immediately refutes Schank’s first claim that the Schank machine could actually understand the stories given to it and also provide answers to the questions about the stories. Regarding the second claim made by Schank, Searle says, “the program explains human understanding, we can see that the computer and its program do not provide sufficient conditions of understanding since the computer and the program are functioning, and there is no