The Chinese Room Revisited: Non-Commutativity, Irreversibility, and the Elimination of Semantic Ghosts

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Main Author: T.O.
Format: Recurso digital
Published: Zenodo 2025
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_version_ 1866901775401877504
author T.O.
author_facet T.O.
contents <p>This paper revisits John Searle’s Chinese Room argument by reformulating it within the axiomatic framework of Cognitional Mechanics (CM). Rather than engaging with metaphysical notions of understanding or intentionality, the analysis treats intelligence as an operational system constrained by non-commutativity and irreversibility.</p> <p>The central claim is that the classical Chinese Room argument relies on a category error: it derives the absence of semantics from a syntactic premise that is implicitly assumed to be commutative and reversible. CM shows that when cognitive operations become non-commutative and irreversible beyond a critical threshold, semantics emerges as an invariant of the system’s dynamics, not as an external interpretive layer.</p> <p>Under this framework, the Chinese Room is revealed as a deliberately constrained commutative system that, by design, cannot support semantic emergence. The apparent absence of understanding is therefore not a refutation of machine intelligence, but a consequence of the imposed operational limitations.</p> <p>By replacing metaphysical intuition with operational law, the paper dissolves the traditional paradox and eliminates what it terms the “semantic ghost.”</p>
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publishDate 2025
publisher Zenodo
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spellingShingle The Chinese Room Revisited: Non-Commutativity, Irreversibility, and the Elimination of Semantic Ghosts
T.O.
Artificial Intelligence
Computer and information sciences
Mathematical model
Mathematical Computing
Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy
Modern philosophy
Philosophy of language
Cognitional Mechanics
The Chinese Room
Searle
<p>This paper revisits John Searle’s Chinese Room argument by reformulating it within the axiomatic framework of Cognitional Mechanics (CM). Rather than engaging with metaphysical notions of understanding or intentionality, the analysis treats intelligence as an operational system constrained by non-commutativity and irreversibility.</p> <p>The central claim is that the classical Chinese Room argument relies on a category error: it derives the absence of semantics from a syntactic premise that is implicitly assumed to be commutative and reversible. CM shows that when cognitive operations become non-commutative and irreversible beyond a critical threshold, semantics emerges as an invariant of the system’s dynamics, not as an external interpretive layer.</p> <p>Under this framework, the Chinese Room is revealed as a deliberately constrained commutative system that, by design, cannot support semantic emergence. The apparent absence of understanding is therefore not a refutation of machine intelligence, but a consequence of the imposed operational limitations.</p> <p>By replacing metaphysical intuition with operational law, the paper dissolves the traditional paradox and eliminates what it terms the “semantic ghost.”</p>
title The Chinese Room Revisited: Non-Commutativity, Irreversibility, and the Elimination of Semantic Ghosts
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer and information sciences
Mathematical model
Mathematical Computing
Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy
Modern philosophy
Philosophy of language
Cognitional Mechanics
The Chinese Room
Searle
url https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18090438