<P> Colin McGinn argues that the Chinese room provides strong evidence that the hard problem of consciousness is fundamentally insoluble . The argument, to be clear, is not about whether a machine can be conscious, but about whether it (or anything else for that matter) can be shown to be conscious . It is plain that any other method of probing the occupant of a Chinese room has the same difficulties in principle as exchanging questions and answers in Chinese . It is simply not possible to divine whether a conscious agency or some clever simulation inhabits the room . </P> <P> Searle argues that this is only true for an observer outside of the room . The whole point of the thought experiment is to put someone inside the room, where they can directly observe the operations of consciousness . Searle claims that from his vantage point within the room there is nothing he can see that could imaginably give rise to consciousness, other than himself, and clearly he does not have a mind that can speak Chinese . </P> <P> Patrick Hew used the Chinese Room argument to deduce requirements from military command and control systems if they are to preserve a commander's moral agency . He drew an analogy between a commander in their command center and the person in the Chinese Room, and analyzed it under a reading of Aristotle's notions of' compulsory' and' ignorance' . Information could be' down converted' from meaning to symbols, and manipulated symbolically, but moral agency could be undermined if there was inadequate' up conversion' into meaning . Hew cited examples from the USS Vincennes incident . </P> <P> The Chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the philosophy of mind, and both major computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to their fields . However, several concepts developed by computer scientists are essential to understanding the argument, including symbol processing, Turing machines, Turing completeness, and the Turing test . </P>

How to get into the chinese room in the turing test