Views into the Chinese Room

John Preston is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading.Mark Bishop is Lecturer in Cybernetics at the University of Reading.

• Introduction ; 1. Twenty-One Years in the Chinese Room ; 2. Searle's Arguments Against Cognitive Science ; 3. Understanding, Orientations, and Objectivity ; 4. A Chinese Room that Understands ; 5. The Chinese Room from a Logical Point of View ; 6. Nixin' Goes to China ; 7. Real Robots and the Missing Thought-Experiment in the Chinese Room Dialectic ; 8. Wittgenstein's Anticipation of the Chinese Room ; 9. The Hinterlandof the Chinese Room ; 10. Searle's Misunderstandings of Functionalism and Strong AI ; 11. Consciousness, Computation, and the Chinese Room ; 12. Neural Depictions of 'World' and 'Self': Bringing Computational Understanding to the Chinese Room ; 13. Do Virtual Actions Avoid the Chinese Room? ; 14. Minds, Machines, and Searle 2: What's Right and Wrong about the Chinese Room Argument ; 15. Alien Encounters ; 16. Cyborgs in the Chinese Room: Boundaries Transgressed and Boundaries Blurred ; 17. Changes in the Rules: Computers, Dynamical Systems, and Searle ; 18. Dancing with Pixies: Strong Artificial Intelligence and Panpsychism ; 19. Syntax, Semantics, Physics ; A Short Bibliography on Searle's Arguments ; Name index, Subject index

Searle fans will not be disappointed ... The editors have produced a genuinely interdisciplinary volume, which should stand for some time as the book to read on the Chinese room argument. John Preston has also written an excellent introduction, so newcomers to the debate will find themselves well prepared for the essays which follow.