The Chinese Gym Argument
The Chinese Gym Argument (see detailed text) shows that instantiating a connectionist network is not enough to produce an understanding of Chinese.
The Chinese Gym ArgumentSuppose the basic Chinese Room were expanded to a large gym of monolingual English-speaking men. The men are spread out like nodes in a network, and they follow English rulebooks that tell them what symbols to pass to one another. Through this procedure they carry out the same computations as a connectionist network would to produce Chinese speech, but none of the men understand Chinese.
Note: Also see Map 4. In particular, "
The Chinese Water Pipe Brain Simulator" Map 4, Box 5 parallels this argument, with hte difference that the Chinese water pipe argument uses one man instead of the gym full of men.
John Searle, 1990.