PHL 201 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Patricia Churchland, Central Processing Unit, Connectionism
14 May 2016
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The connectionist reply (as it might be called) is set forth---along with a recapitulation of the chinese room argument and a rejoinder by searle---by paul and patricia churchland in a 1990 scientific american piece. The churchlands criticize the crucial third axiom of searle"s derivation by attacking his would-be supporting thought experimental result. This putative result, they contend, gets much if not all of its plausibility from the lack of neurophysiological verisimilitude in the thought-experimental setup. Instead of imagining searle working alone with his pad of paper and lookup table, like the. Central processing unit of a serial architecture machine, the churchlands invite us to imagine a more brainlike connectionist architecture. Imagine searle-in-the-room, then, to be just one of very many agents, all working in parallel, each doing their own small bit of processing (like the many neurons of the brain).
