'Chinese room' philosopher John Searle dies (www.semafor.com)

John Searle, the US-born philosopher best known for the "Chinese room" thought experiment, has died at 93. The thought experiment imagines a person who doesn’t speak Chinese locked in a room with an instruction manual that maps Chinese symbols to responses. The person can produce appropriate answers to Chinese inputs by following syntactic rules, yet Searle argued there is no genuine understanding or semantic content—only symbol manipulation. He used this to challenge "strong AI" claims that running the right program is sufficient for consciousness or understanding. Searle’s intervention remains central to AI/ML debates because it isolates a technical distinction—syntax versus semantics—and forces designers and theorists to justify whether observable competence implies internal understanding. Critics responded with the "systems reply" (the whole system, not the person, may understand) and other counters, but the dispute still shapes thinking about language models, symbol grounding, embodied cognition, and whether scaling statistical models can ever yield genuine semantics. His work pushed researchers to clarify what they mean by "understanding," to probe interpretability, and to explore grounding and causal role of representations. Searle’s reputation was also marked by controversy: UC Berkeley removed his emeritus status in 2019 over sexual-harassment findings.