Question

Can someone explain Searle's Chinese gym argument and Churchlands counterargument?

Answer 1

The Chinese gym argument tends to show that instantiating a connectionist network is not enough to produce a true understanding of Chinese. Suppose 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.