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John Searle's Minds, Brains And Programs

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In John Searle's paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs” the philosopher comes to two major conclusions at the end of his work. The first conclusion Searle argues is that a user or machine that is only able to recognize symbols and respond to them based on a predefined program can not be said to understand a language because it does not and does not need to understand the meaning of the phrases being introduced to the system, it only needs to recognize the symbols and respond with the appropriate symbols of a sufficient answer. Searle's second conclusion in his paper is that although the thought process of a human being is similar to the computation process of a machine the human mind possess an unknown variable that allows humans to understand

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