Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessReflection

In 1980 the philosopher John Searle imagined a person in a room answering questions in Chinese by following a rulebook, without understanding a word. The replies convince the Chinese speakers outside. Searle's 'Chinese Room' asks whether handling symbols correctly is enough for understanding. He argued that it is not.

John Searle

PhilosophyTechnologyMind

The story behind the card

John Searle (1932–2025) was an American philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. He aimed the argument at 'strong AI', the claim that a computer running the right program would truly have a mind. A common reply says that the person may not understand, but the whole system of person, rules and room does. Searle answered that even if the person memorised the rules and did everything in their head, they would still not understand a word of Chinese.

Türkçe oku
Filozof John Searle 1980'de, bir odada Çince soruları bir kural kitabına bakarak cevaplayan ama tek kelime Çince bilmeyen birini hayal etti. Dışarıdaki Çince konuşanlar, cevaplara bakıp odadakinin dili bildiğine inanır. Searle'ün “Çin Odası” düşünce deneyi, sembolleri doğru kullanmanın anlamak için yeterli olup olmadığını sorar. Searle'e göre yeterli değildir.

John Searle (1932–2025), Berkeley'deki Kaliforniya Üniversitesi'nde ders veren Amerikalı bir filozoftu. Bu düşünce deneyini, doğru programı çalıştıran bir bilgisayarın gerçekten zihin sahibi olacağını söyleyen “güçlü yapay zekâ” görüşüne karşı ortaya attı. En bilinen itiraza göre odadaki kişi anlamasa da kişi, kurallar ve odadan oluşan sistemin bütünü anlıyordur. Searle'ün cevabı şuydu: Kişi bütün kuralları ezberleyip her şeyi kafasında yapsa bile yine tek kelime Çince anlamış olmaz.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Chinese room
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveTechnology

Kerb cuts, the small ramps where a pavement meets the road, were won by disabled campaigners for wheelchair users. They now help anyone pushing a pram, pulling a suitcase or wheeling a trolley.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, installed some of the first kerb cuts in the 1940s, in a pilot scheme proposed by the lawyer and war veteran Jack H. Fischer to help disabled veterans get to work. In the 1970s the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California, a group run by disabled people and co-founded by Ed Roberts, pushed for cuts along Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues, creating one of the first continuous step-free routes through an American city. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 later made kerb ramps a legal requirement on new and altered streets across the United States. In 2017 the policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell named the wider pattern the 'curb-cut effect': a change made for one group often ends up helping almost everyone.

Smithsonian / Stanford Social Innovation ReviewRead card
StillnessPhilosophy

Care ethics is a school of moral philosophy that starts from the fact that everyone depends on others, as children, when ill and in old age, and asks what we owe to those who give and need care.

The American psychologist Carol Gilligan is usually seen as its founder. In her 1982 book In a Different Voice she challenged her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg, whose scale of moral development, built from interviews with boys, ranked reasoning about rules and rights above reasoning about relationships and responsibility, and so tended to rate women as less morally mature. The philosopher Nel Noddings developed the idea in her 1984 book Caring, arguing that responding to a particular person in need is a serious moral act, not a lesser one than applying a rule. The approach has shaped thinking in nursing, social work and disability rights, fields where much care work is unpaid or poorly paid.

Care ethicsRead card
DrivePhilosophy

The capability approach, developed by the economist Amartya Sen, judges how well people live by what they are actually able to do and be, not only by how much money or resources they have.

The same income can mean very different lives depending on health, safety, education, disability, gender, transport and social freedom: a wheelchair user needs more resources than others to get around the same city. Sen set out the idea in a 1979 lecture, 'Equality of What?', and developed it through the 1980s. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum extended it in 2000 into a list of ten central capabilities, such as health, play and a say in political decisions, that she argued every government should secure. The approach also shaped the United Nations Human Development Index, created in 1990 by the economist Mahbub ul Haq with Sen, which ranks countries by health and education as well as income.

Amartya Sen / Martha NussbaumRead card
DriveMind

When a task stretches your skills without overwhelming you, you can become so absorbed that time seems to disappear. Psychologists call this flow.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist, developed the idea after interviewing painters, chess players, rock climbers and surgeons who described a strikingly similar state of total absorption. To study it beyond the interview room, he pioneered the experience sampling method: participants carried pagers that beeped at random points during the day, prompting them to note what they were doing and how absorbed they felt. He set out the full model in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Flow is more likely when the challenge matches your skills, the goal is clear, and you can tell how you are doing. Too little challenge tends toward boredom, and too much toward anxiety.

Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiRead card
StillnessMind

Talking to yourself by your own name, or as 'you' instead of 'I', can help you stay calmer under stress. In experiments, people who did this before giving a speech felt less anxious, spoke better and brooded less afterwards.

The psychologist Ethan Kross and colleagues at the University of Michigan asked people to prepare a speech with only five minutes' notice. Some were told to talk themselves through their nerves using 'I', others using their own name or 'you'. The second group reported less anxiety and shame, judges rated their speeches higher, and afterwards they spent less time on rumination, the habit of replaying what went wrong. Kross's explanation is that addressing yourself as you would a friend creates a little distance, which makes the problem easier to see clearly. The effects are modest: a small, usable tool for handling stress, not a cure for anxiety.

Psychology researchRead card
Next card in the archiveIn Reasons and Persons (1984), the philosopher Derek Parfit imagined a machine that scans your body on Earth, destroys it and rebuilds it on Mars from new matter. The person who wakes there has your memories and plans. Is that you surviving, or does something irreplaceable end with the original body?Read next →