I had difficulty following your presentation of the problem, so I dredged this up:
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"The Chinese Room argument, devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese characters, such that to those outside the room it appears as if someone in the room understands Chinese. The argument is intended to show that while suitably programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principle. Searle argues that
the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. Searle's argument is a direct challenge to proponents of Artificial Intelligence, and the argument also has broad implications for functionalist and computational theories of meaning and of mind. As a result,
there have been many critical replies to the argument."
Searle's argument seems logical. I'd like to read the critical replies (I'm sure some of them are pretty heated, given all the grant money at risk
).
While I don't toil in the fields of philosophy or AI, it seems to me that AI is actually no more than highly sophisticated algorhythms that attempt to mimic human thought processes.
I don't know if attempts have been made to write code that approximates the unconscious - that would seem to me to require supercomputers which would totally eclipse those that we have today.
I find it difficult to comprehend the speed at which the human mind works at the unconscious level, evaluating, comparing, "what if"ing and looking outside the envelope in search of new and unique couplings/pairings/combinations which, in the human mind, can happen, as manifested in "strokes of genius" which are then developed in the conscious mind before being presented.
Even if such a speedy supercomputer could be created, it seems to me that the larger challenge would be for programmers to develop welltanschauung and gestalt plug-ins.
The problems of developing artificial intelligence are very interesting, but, given the state of today's world, I think a more pressing need is to somehow find a way of eradicating genuine stupidity.