a superintelligent machine would not necessarily have a mind and consciousness. The Chinese room implements a version of the Turing test. Alan Turing The Chinese room argument holds that a computer executing a program cannot have a mind, understanding, or consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was presented in a 1980 paper by the American philosopher John Searle, entitled "Minds, Brains, and Programs" and published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Similar The… The Chinese room implements a version of the Turing test. Alan Turing introduced the test in 1950 to help answer the question "can machines think?" In the standard version, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. Turing then considered each possible objection to the proposal "machines can think", and found that there are simple, obvious answers if the question is de-mystified in this way. He did not, however, intend for the test to measure for the presence of "consciousness" or "understanding". He did not believe this was relevant to the issues that he was addressing. He wrote: The Chinese room has a design analogous to that of a modern computer. It has a Von Neumann architecture, which consists of a program (the book of instructions), some memory (the papers and file cabinets), a machine that follows the instructions (the man), and a means to write symbols in memory (the pencil and eraser). A machine with this design is known in theoretical computer science as "Turing complete", because it has the necessary machinery to carry out any computation that a Turing machine can do, and therefore it is capable of doing a step-by-step simulation of any other digital machine, given enough memory and time. Turing writes, "all digital computers are in a sense equivalent." The widely accepted Church–Turing thesis holds that any function computable by an effective procedure is computable by a Turing machine. The Turing completeness of the Chinese room implies that it can do whatever any other digital computer can do (albeit much, much more slowly). Thus, if the Chinese room does not or can not contain a Chinese-speaking mind, then no other digital computer can contain a mind. Some replies to Searle begin by arguing that the room, as described, cannot have a Chinese-speaking mind. Arguments of this form, according to Stevan Harnad, are "no refutation (but rather an affirmation)" of the Chinese room…

Computer learning techniques, as embodied in neural networks, are modelled on the way we learn and make decisions. With the ever greater power of computers, one may wonder if a point might be reached when it could be said that the computer has become conscious, that it behaves in the way that a thinking human being behaves. In his book Shadows of the Mind, Roger Penrose argues that our conscious mentality cannot be fully understood in terms of computational models, using mathematical theorems due to Godel and Turing. The mathematics of computation and formal systems is developed in some detail, and it is shown that Penrose’s argument does not work.