RecipeExpert as a Philosophical Thought Experiment

Jim Mason
8 min readApr 26, 2021

Searle’s “Chinese Room” and Philosophical Zombies are straw men

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Thought experiments like John Searle’s Chinese Room argument or arguments based on the Philosophical Zombie idea — see Wikipedia and elsewhere for details about those — are purported by some to demonstrate that computer algorithms cannot think the way people do, because unlike us, they cannot be truly conscious.

In this essay I will demonstrate that computer algorithms can be designed to think in many ways as we humans do and be conscious in many of the ways that we are. In doing so I will use an actual computer system as a thought experiment — not a far-fetched hypothetical one like the Chinese Room or Philosophical Zombie — but one that can be built, and likely soon will be: the RecipeExpert system described in some of my earlier articles on Medium. For details, see

https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/components-of-a-recipe-expert-system-1f038fd0c79b

It’s important to understand about the implementation of a RecipeExpert system that its knowledge can and will be limited to well-defined areas. Those areas are (1) physical measurement systems (American, metric, and possibly older Imperial measurements), (2) equipment used for preparing food, (3) ingredients used in food, (4) techniques for using equipment and measurement systems to manipulate food ingredients, (5) recipes as algorithms for using ingredients, equipment, and techniques to prepare food, (6) English language tools used to communicate about its other knowledge areas, and (7) agents like people and itself who know things about its areas of knowledge. It will also have limited knowledge about individual people, including knowledge about its previous interactions with them; their allergies, preferences, dislikes, and other attitudes toward specific ingredients, ingredient combinations, and techniques.

Many of its internal knowledge systems will be designed for it to extend, by learning about new pieces of equipment, new ingredients, new recipes, and possibly even new food characteristics, based on its existing knowledge and on information it receives from people or from other implementations of a RecipeExpert system. It will also be able to extend its knowledge of English as the language it uses to communicate…

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Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership