From the Chinese room argument to the church-turing thesis

Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment incorporates a number of assumptions about the role and nature of programs within the computational theory of mind. Two assumptions are analysed in this paper. One is concerned with how interactive we should expect programs to be for a complex cognitive system to be interpreted as having understanding about its environment and its own inner processes. The second is about how self-reflective programs might analyse their own processes. In particular, how self-reflection, and a high level of interactivity with the environment and other intelligent agents in the environment, may give rise to understanding in artificial cognitive systems. A further contribution that this paper makes is to demonstrate that the Church-Turing Thesis does not apply to interactive systems, and to self-reflective systems that incorporate interactivity. This is an important finding because it means that claims about interactive and self-reflective systems need to be considered on a case by case basis rather than using lessons from relatively simple non-interactive and non-reflective computational models to generalise to all computational processes.