The Chinese Room Revisited
Whole forests have been wasted in the effort to refute the
Chinese Room Thought Experiment proposed by Searle in 1980 and
refined (really derived from axioms) in 1990. The experiment
envisages a room in which an English speaker sits, equipped with
a book of instructions in English. Through one window messages
in Chinese are passed on to him (in the original experiment, two
types of messages). He is supposed to follow the instructions
and correlate the messages received with other pieces of paper,
already in the room, also in Chinese. This collage he passes on
to the outside through yet another window. The comparison with a
computer is evident. There is input, a processing unit and
output. What Searle tried to demonstrate is that there is no
need to assume that the central processing unit (the English
speaker) understands (or, for that matter, performs any other
cognitive or mental function) the input or the output (both in
Chinese). Searle generalized and stated that this shows that
computers will never be capable of thinking, being conscious, or
having other mental states. In his picturesque language "syntax
is not a sufficient base for semantics". Consciousness is not
reducible to computations. It takes a certain "stuff" (the
brain) to get these results.
Objections to the mode of presentation selected by Searle and to
the conclusions that he derived were almost immediately raised.
Searle fought back effectively. But throughout these debates a
few points seemed to have escaped most of those involved.
First, the English speaker inside the room himself is a
conscious entity, replete and complete with mental states,
cognition, awareness and emotional powers. Searle went to the
extent of introducing himself to the Chinese Room (in his
disputation). Whereas Searle would be hard pressed to prove (to
himself) that the English speaker in the room is possessed of
mental states