Connectionism, Chinese Rooms, and Intuition Pumps

Abstract

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.