Thought Experiment: The Chinese Room
Food for thought
“The Chinese Room " is a thought experiment proposed by philosopher John Searle with the scenario set as follows:
Consider a man, locked in a room with instructions on constructing Chinese characters and forming sentences. This man himself does not know the Chinese language and has no understanding of whatever meaningful sentence he conjures.
With this information in mind, I propose two possible continuations.
Firstly, from the information provided, we know that the man can accept some Chinese characters as inputs, and then return the possible ways the characters may be arranged to make meaningful sentences.
Using this as a reference, with the ability to also receive inputs while returning logical and sound outputs, can we ever say that artificial intelligence, AI is capable of “understanding”? Or is this an argument in itself against the notion of understanding for AI?
The second continuation to this goes something like this. If we are told that the messages the man has been receiving as input and feedback are actually from a woman knowledgeable in Chinese, who is oblivious to the fact that the man in the room she has been flirting with has no understanding of what he’s been saying.
When the man is finally let out of the room and meets the woman, he finds out what exactly has been transpiring and is elated at the interest of a beautiful woman.
The woman on the other hand finds out about the situation and is appalled. She feels betrayed and of course, has lost all interest in the man as a person.
Are both of their reactions justified? And regardless of your answer, what do you suppose has changed between before and after the man left the room to elicit such reactions?
I’m curious about your thoughts on these questions and would like to hear you in the comments. Follow if you’re interested in pieces like these.
