Change in the Rules: Computers, Dynamical Systems, and Searle

Abstract The Chinese Room Argument (described elsewhere in this volume) is directed against what John Searle calls stronB artificial intelliBence ( StronB AI), an intellectual position according to which ‘the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states’ (Searle 1980: 4171 (B67), emphasis in original). Searle is thus famously opposed to the view that computation is sufficient for mind. Recently, some equally vocal opposition to the computational orthodoxy in AI and cognitive science has come from another quarter, namely the emerging dynamical systems approach to COBnition (henceforth DSC), which is the view that ‘[natural] cognitive systems are dynamical systems and are best understood from the perspective of dynamics’ (van Gelder and Port 1995: 5).