CONCEPT
Strong AI
The philosophical position
Searle formulated and then spent forty-five years refuting — that an appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds — distinct from the uncontroversial "Weak AI" claim that computers are useful tools for modeling cognition.
Strong AI, as Searle defined it in 1980, was the claim that computation of the right kind was sufficient for mentality. Not that computation might model mentality, not that computation might one day produce systems behaviorally indistinguishable from
minds, but that the right program running on the right hardware would have mental states — understanding, belief, desire, perception — in the same sense that humans have them. The computer would not merely simulate thinking; it would think. The position was the intellectual foundation of the dominant AI research program of the 1970s and 1980s, drawing on the
computational theory of mind in cognitive science and the functionalist theory of mental states in philosophy of mind. Searle's
Chinese Room argument was designed to refute Strong AI by demonstrating that formal symbol manipulation — the defining activity of computation — does not produce the semantic