Computation Paper
Is the Brain a Computer? To Searle the definition of computation is “defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.” John Searle uses the Chinese Room as an example of a computerized mind. We have to assume that the man in the room, outside from Chinese people, does not know any Chinese. But he has a set of rules that can help him communicate with the Chinese outside. When he stirs up a conversation, does it really mean that he can understand and write Chinese? Or is it just the mind doing one of the amazing things it can do and translating everything? I do believe that the brain is like a computer but computers have websites and programs that help it function or make the computer useful. So we still have to learn and “download” the programs into our “computer.” For example, cheating, a lot of students do it at school. When a student does not understand the material, he or she ends up copying off of another classmate for homework assignments. By test day, the teacher is not going to give the student a pass and let him go off the hook just because he didn’t get the material. He will still have to take the test. But he did not understand the material, so what does he do? He copies again. Copying does not help a student learn anything. The brain has nothing to do with copying. It is not like the brain will automatically change all the confusing text to something much similar for the student to understand. Copying might download a little bit of information into his brain/computer but overall the student did not know or understand it. By the end of the day, he will know very little about the subject but that is still more than he started with. Machines are given numerous simple instructions that turn into complicated tasks. Machines also do not think, they just do what they are told. Searle questions whether or not the person understands the Chinese being given to him. Then he argues that without understanding a language there is basically no way that the