Chinese Room
Overview
Searle asks us to imagine a person who knows no Chinese locked in a room. This person receives Chinese characters through a slot and looks up those symbols in a book; when he finds a match he sees a set of corresponding characters, writes them down, and pushes the response back through the slot. The person on the other side would be quite convinced that the person in the room understood Chinese very well.
Notes:
- Important in relation to #Artificial_intelligence and specifically #Large_Language_Models (LLMs).
- The Chinese Room is a thought experiment proposed by philosopher John Searle in 1980, in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs".
- My view (see Consciousness): the experiment shows that the man in the room does not understand Chinese, which nobody claimed. The question is whether the system (man, book, room, and procedure) understands Chinese, and Searle's reply, that the man could memorise the book and still not understand, assumes what it needs to prove. If understanding is a matter of organisation rather than substrate, there is no principled reason a non-biological system could not have it. Whether any current system does is a separate question, and my answer is "almost certainly not".