Ruslan Myronenko

The article analyzes John Searle's famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment, which denies the ability of artificial intelligence to achieve genuine understanding. The study aims to deconstruct this argumentation step by step to clarify exactly how it is structured, what makes it persuasive, and where its weaknesses lie. For this purpose, a model is applied that examines the text at four levels. The first level clarifies the historical background: specifically, whose ideas and computer programs the author opposed. The second level demonstrates how Searle constructs the experiment's scenario to subtly impose discussion rules that favor his position on the audience. In the third stage, the relevance of comparing a computer's operation to the actions of a person mechanically sorting incomprehensible characters is examined. The analysis reveals that the persuasiveness of the argumentation relies heavily on the assumption that only a biological brain is capable of generating consciousness. At the fourth level, the experiment is tested for robustness using the most well-known objections from critics. The conducted analysis shows that Searle successfully proves a machine's inability to understand meaning solely through the mechanical manipulation of symbols. However, his thought experiment proves vulnerable to the assumption that consciousness can emerge as an entirely new property of highly complex systems. Using modern Large Language Models (LLMs) as an example, the study concludes that the "Chinese Room" argument remains relevant, as it proves that machines do not grasp the physical connection between words and the real world. At the same time, this does not rule out the possibility that artificial intelligence is capable of successfully operating with syntactic connections between words within the language itself.

The question of free will and determinism is one of the most discussed in analytic philosophy. This is because interdisciplinary research has entered the field of studying the brain and consciousness – and often, consciousness is presented as an invention, an epiphenomenon. One of the attributes of consciousness is free will. The prehistory of modern research in the field of free will is the discussion about the need for future events, which was first analyzed by Stagirite in chapter 9, "On Interpretation". Despite all the analyticity and consistency of Aristotle's works, this work is full of gaps in argumentation and formulations ambiguity. In this regard, over two thousand years, philosophers have described many reconstructions in this chapter's argumentation and interpretations. Conventionally, the question of fatalism can be divided into two intersecting directions: logical fatalism and theological fatalism. This article examines the first direction and will relate to the understanding of fatalism and arguments against it in the context of the development of logic and theory of argumentation in the 20th century. The first logician who radically revised the foundations of logic to build an argument against future events' fatalism was Jan Lukasiewicz. We can say that all his life Lukasiewicz fought against determinism and tried to find a logical basis for human freedom of will. However, the main discussion on this issue took place in the middle of the 20th century between the logicians whose work will be considered in this article: Linsky Leonard, Butler Ronald, Storrs McCall, and others. The discussion was conducted around understanding such philosophical concepts and their ontological status: time, truth, a necessity. Also, in the wake of Lukasiewicz, they clarified such logical concepts as bivalence and the law of the excluded third. Of particular interest was the emergence of logical modalities, true/false, which can change their meaning over time, which led to the emergence of new informal logic.