Chinese Room: McDonald's Rebuttal

We considered a Chinese restaurant, and a Mexican restaurant. How about an American restaurant? How about McDonald’s? This is not my area of expertise, so let me tag team with Searle, and let me cook at McDonald’s. In principle only. If you eat at McDonald’s you probably know more about the customer experience than I ever will, but suppose I go to work in the kitchen. Let’s suppose my first job is making french fries. So I learn everything about keeping the oil at the correct temperature, the amount of potatoes in a batch, the length of time it takes, the amount of salt I apply, and the different sized packages. Maybe I also learn which customer orders come with fries, and of what size.

Next I get promoted to the grill. If I’m Searle, which I’m not, I forget everything I learned about fries. At the end Searle understands nothing. But I’m going to understand something. How much we’ll have to see. So at the grill I have more options. We have hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and the double decker Big Mac. So I learn more specifically what customer orders come with what grill options.

Eventually I get promoted all the way up to taking customer orders, where I really learn what food items go with which customer orders. That includes soft drinks, milkshakes, and all the rest. At this point let’s evaluate how much I understand. Do I understand everything from the inside? Yes. But I don’t understand anything from the outside. I don’t understand the customer experience. I don’t know how the food tastes. I can only guess based upon analogies from food I’ve eaten elsewhere, but an artificial intelligence doesn’t even have that much to fall back on.

So let’s try real hard to understand what John Searle can claim about artificial intelligence? The deaf chef qualification not only applies to any man in the Chinese Room, but it also applies to any artificial intelligence in the room. Bet you didn’t think of that. Any artificial intelligence is not going to duplicate human experience. It's going to experience something else, something alien. It may be able to communicate in English, like the computer aboard the Star Trek Enterprise, but it will never understand what it's like to be human.

But that does not support Searle’s claim that the artificial intelligence understands nothing. Understanding involves making valid associations, as I did in the McDonald's kitchen. In fact, my room analogies help us understand the true meaning of the Chinese Room argument. Computers are designed to store references to data, which is what associations are ultimately made of.