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thought? So Searle’s Gedankenexperiment has uselessly taken us round in a circle. Far from
providing a means of settling this question in the negative, the Chinese room thought experi-
ment leaves the question dangling unanswered. There is nothing in the Chinese room scenario
that can help us to decide whether or not to believe the program’s pronouncement ‘I think’. The
conclusion that Amy Chung does not understand the Chinese characters certainly does not
follow from the fact that Searle (beavering away in the room) cannot understand the Chinese
characters.^47 So Searle’s attack on the Turing test fails.
Alan Turing’s test has been attacked by some of the sharpest minds in the business. To
date, however, it stands unrefuted. In fact, it is the only viable proposal on the table for testing
whether a computer is capable of thought.