Chinese Room: Library Rebuttal

One of the hallmarks of competent analogies is a one-to-one correspondence that maps aspects of an analogy onto aspects of the analogized target. We’re considering three corresponding analogies: human intelligence, artificial intelligence, and the Chinese Room experiment. While many aspects overlap, we are specifically interested in examining the role that John Searle plays in the Chinese Room and his equivalent role in the other analogies. Searle executes instructions and keeps notes on scraps of paper. This is equivalent to the processor and memory in the artificial intelligence analogy, and the brain in the human intelligence analogy.

Hardware is like an uninitialized brain. Software comes in two varieties: data and instructions. Data is stored in individual memory locations, like neurons. Instructions control the pathways, in a general purpose computer, that connect the memory locations together, like the inputs and outputs of neurons. The processor and instructions then compute activity and store the resultant data at individual memory locations. Data can be values or references. References are pointers to data. Information is what we call organized data. This is equivalent to the neural network of the brain, comprised of individual neurons integrated together into intricate circuits.

An inactive brain is considered brain dead. A slow mind is simply stupid. As a human mind is comprised of thought processes, artificial intelligence is comprised of computer processes. Those processes reside outside the scope of Searle’s awareness, both inside the thought experiment and apparently outside of it as well.

The interrogator on the outside could detect no difference if Searle were replaced inside the Chinese Room with a Chinaman who does understand Chinese. The Chinaman could perform the tasks done by Searle without accessing any of his own understanding of Chinese. Therefore, whether or not the man in the Chinese Room understands Chinese is irrelevant to the operation of the Chinese Room.

As Searle is presumably an intelligent agent, for which we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, the initial interpretation assumes that any intelligent behavior that arises within the simulation arises within the man in the room. This is not the case. The part of the system that the man in the room serves does not contain any of the relevant requirements for understanding Chinese.

The reason Searle asserts that he never learns Chinese is that he’s either too bogged down in the details or too detached from reality. Searle ‘can’t see the forest for its trees,’ or his ‘head is in the clouds.’ Either way he’s missed the mark. Therefore Searle is guilty of mistaken identity.

Chinese Library

In fact, John Searle’s performance as a computer hardware emulator in the Chinese Room is deficient in two crucial respects: speed and accuracy. Keeping notes on scraps of paper introduces an organizational nightmare. To address this obstacle I propose instantiating the Chinese Room inside of a Library, where all the books have been replaced by abacuses that have a direct one-to-one correspondence with memory locations in the computer memory, only each abacus inside the Chinese Library will need to be addressed via the Dewey Decimal System.

This Chinese Library variation improves Searle’s organizational ability and accuracy; but his speed, as with the original Chinese Room argument, continues to suck beyond belief. Understanding occurs at the speed of thought, not the speed of rot. Notice that the Chinese Kitchen, which operates in real time, does not suffer any speed discrepancy. So the results are realistic. Whereas with abacuses a trained Chinaman should exceed the speed of Searle, while never using his native understanding of Chinese. Searle is guilty of an assumed identity. The person in the Chinese Room is performing the role of the hardware, which is equivalent to the brain not the mind.

The natural, but incorrect, assumption is that since Searle is presumably an intelligent agent, that any artificial intelligence within the Chinese Room occurs within him. This is an incorrect assumption.