Otto in the Chinese Room

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore a possible resolution toone of the main objections to machine thought as propoundedby Alan Turing in the imitation game that bears his name. Thatmachines will, at some point, be able to think is the central idea ofthis text, a claim supported by a schema posited by Andy Clark andDavid Chalmers in their paper, “The Extended Mind” (1998). Theirnotion of active externalism is used to support, strengthen, andfurther what John Searle calls “the systems reply” to his objectionto machine thought or strong Artificial Intelligence in his ChineseRoom thought experiment. Relevant objections and replies to theseobjections are considered, then some conclusions about machinethought and the Turing Test are examined.