Abstract

In his original version of the “Chinese Room Argument”, John Searle appears to be more interested in refuting the “Strong AI thesis” as a philosophical thesis on the nature of mind rather than revealing some empirical problems embedded in the practices of Natural Language Processing (NLP) . Hence, even if the “Chinese room” could be replaced by a “Japanese room”, the structure of Searle's argument would not be thereby changed. However, Searle's indifference to the difference between natural languages, say, that between Chinese and Japanese, blocks his way to apprehend a critical feature of Japanese, namely, the very relevance of the embodied situations of the speakers to certain expressions. And the ignorance of this feature also makes him ignorant of how challenging it is for mainstream approaches in NLP to do justice to the phenomenal feelings of Japanese speakers, or how difficult it is for a computer program to pass the Turing Test on the linguistic capacities for Japanese. In this sense, to update Searle's original “Chinese room” as a “Japanese room” would greatly facilitate our critical assessment of the mainstream NLP approaches' capacity for handling linguistic problems related to embodied situations of human language speakers, although assessment of this type is not so relevant to the plausibility of the Strong AI thesis as merely a metaphysical issue.

Key Words

Japanese room; Natural language processing; Embodiment; Artificial neural network

Citation: Xu, Y. 'What if the “Chinese Room” is Updated as the “Japanese Room”? On How to Make an Embodied AI System for Natural Language Processing' [J]. Journal of Dialectics of Nature, 2018, 40(1): 8-16.

Download: What if the “Chinese Room” is Updated as the “Japanese Room”? On How to Make an Embodied AI System for Natural Language Processing