Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am Read Free

thing as proof. The Terminator machines’ behavior in the movies justifies accepting that the machines can think, but this doesn’t eliminate all doubt. I believe that something could behave like a thinking being without actually being one.
     
    You may disagree; a lot of philosophers do. 4 I find that the most convincing argument in the debate is John Searle’s famous “Chinese room” thought experiment, which in this context is better termed the “Austrian Terminator” thought experiment, for reasons that will become clear. 5 Searle argues that it is possible to behave like a thinking being without actually being a thinker. To demonstrate this, he asks us to imagine a hypothetical situation in which a man who does not speak Chinese is employed to sit in a room and sort pieces of paper on which are written various Chinese characters. He has a book of instructions, telling him which Chinese characters to post out of the room through the out slot in response to other Chinese characters that are posted into the room through the in slot. Little does the man know, but the characters he is receiving and sending out constitute a conversation in Chinese. Then in walks a robot assassin! No, I’m joking; there’s no robot assassin.
     
    Searle’s point is that the man is behaving like a Chinese speaker from the perspective of those outside the room, but he still doesn’t understand Chinese. Just because someone—or some thing —is following a program doesn’t mean that he (or it) has any understanding of what he (or it) is doing. So, for a computer following a program, no output, however complex, could establish that the computer is thinking.
     
    Or let’s put it this way. Imagine that inside the Model T-101 cyborg from The Terminator there lives a very small and weedy Austrian, who speaks no English. He’s so small that he can live in a room inside the metal endoskeleton. It doesn’t matter why he’s so small or why Skynet put him there; who knows what weird experiments Skynet might perform on human stock? 6 Anyway, the small Austrian has a job to do for Skynet while living inside the T-101. Periodically, a piece of paper filled with English writing floats down to him from Big Arnie’s neck. The little Austrian has a computer file telling him how to match these phrases of English with corresponding English replies, spelled out phonetically, which he must sound out in a tough voice. He doesn’t understand what he’s saying, and his pronunciation really isn’t very good, but he muddles his way through, growling things like “Are you Sarah Cah-naah?,” “Ahl be bahk!,” and “Hastah lah vihstah, baby!” 7 The little Austrian can see into the outside world, fed images on a screen by cameras in Arnie’s eyes, but he pays very little attention. He likes to watch when the cyborg is going to get into a shootout or drive a car through the front of a police station, but he has no interest in the mission, and in fact, the dialogue scenes he has to act out bore him because he can’t understand them. He twiddles his thumbs and doesn’t even look at the screen as he recites mysterious words like “Ahm a friend of Sarah Ca-hnaah. Ah wahs told she wahs heah.”
     
    When the little Austrian is called back to live inside the T-101 in T2 , his dialogue becomes more complicated. Now there are extended English conversations about plans to evade the Terminator T-1000 and about the nature of feelings. The Austrian dutifully recites the words that are spelled out phonetically for him, sounding out announcements like “Mah CPU is ah neural net processah, a learning computah” without even wondering what they might mean. He just sits there flicking through a comic book, hoping that the cyborg will soon race a truck down a busy highway.
     
    The point, of course, is that the little Austrian doesn’t understand English. He doesn’t understand English despite the fact that he is conducting complex conversations in English .