The Chinese Room Argument is a thought experiment created by John Searle with the purpose to answer the question of whether or not a machine could think. His experiment inspires thoughts on intentionality, understanding, consciousness, and thinking. It is inspired by the work of Roger Schank which was a program that attempted to “simulate the human ability to understand stories” (Searle 417). Basically, if a person and a machine were to be told a story and asked to answer questions about the story, both of them could. The machine could answer the same questions similarly if given the correct information that humans have regarding the story. However, in contrast to what supporters of strong AI would say, the catch is that although the machine is returning almost the exact same answers, the machine doesn’t actually understand the story or that it is a story while the human does. Now that we’ve established Searle’s inspiration, onto the Chinese Room.
The Chinese Room works as follows. There is an English-speaking person in a locked room who does not know any Chinese at all. This person receives 3 batches of Chinese characters that the person must respond to follow some sort of rule book. The first batch of Chinese characters, the person realizes that on the page are Chinese characters that the person does not and will not understand whatsoever. The second batch of Chinese characters, the person receives a set of rules in English that help the person correlate the, now, two batches of characters. The third batch of Chinese characters, the person receives instructions with it that are in English which helps the person correlate this batch with the previous batches of Chinese characters and also what to give back in response. The person in the locked room is unaware that the “first batch [is] “a script”…the second batch [is] a “story,”… the third batch [is] “questions” (Searle 418). They also refer to the person’s responses to the third batch to be “answers to the questions” and the rules and instructions that were given in English as “the program” (Searle 418). He then goes further with the thought experiment and says how eventually, the person got really good at this exchange: being given batches of Chinese characters to correlate with each other resulting in spitting back a response utilizing the rules in English. The person now is so good at doing this input and output action that the people outside of the room think it is a native Chinese speaker who is inside of the locked room. Searle explains how although to an outsider’s view, the person in the locked room is a Chinese speaker, the person doesn’t actually know or understand anything at all. The person “simply behave[s] like a computer” (Searle 418).
The whole purpose of this thought experiment is to exploit how the person seems to understand everything but actually understands nothing at all. Now, Searle applies this thought experiment to a program, as if the person inside was a machine functioning by a written computer program. While “the claims made by strong AI are the programmed computer understand the stories and that the program in some sense explains human understanding” (Searle 418), Searle argues against these claims that, essentially, the person has no possibility of actually understanding what the Chinese characters mean and that the person simply follows the “program” which “does not provide sufficient conditions of understanding” (Searle 418). Yes, the person does respond in a way that you would think they understand, however, the person is simply functioning accordingly to the program while understanding nothing. If you replace the word “person” with “machine”, you can understand the direct parallel between the person in the locked room and a hypothetical machine that can easily take its place for the sake of the thought experiment. This thought experiment explains how while the person or machine inside of the locked room is seen as a Chinese speaker to an outside perspective, the person or machine inside does not understand any of it.
Ultimately with the Chinese Room argument, Searle concludes that machines aren’t able to actually understand what they are given no matter what they do because it is all programmed. The machine does not think, learn, or understand on its own and only appears to do so because of its program.
