Why I don't buy the Chinese Room

The Chinese Room is a thought experiment proposed by John Searle, meant to evoke intuitions that disprove the computational theory of mind (roughly, that the mind is a symbol-manipulating, somewhat computer-like machine). Let me summarize the argument quickly.

Imagine you have a person inside a room. The room has an input slot, through which the person receives cards with Chinese symbols written on them. The person takes the card over to a book, which has something like a dictionary of "if... then" commands. If the card received has symbol X printed on it, for example, the book will tell the person to output a card with symbol Y. The symbols that are outputted are precisely correct responses to the input symbols, also in Chinese. The person will then write symbol Y on a card, and proceed to push it out of the room through the output slot. In this way, it would be hypothetically possible to hold an entire conversation with the room.

The question is -- does the person in the room know Chinese? Searle's argument is that if the computational theory of mind is right, we would have to say yes -- after all, the room is doing what a good computer should. It has a vast memory with instructions on how to proceed (the book), a processor to manipulate the symbols (the person), but it seems intuitive that neither the person nor the entire room understands Chinese. Imagine the person memorizing the book -- the intuition doesn't seem to change. No Chinese understanding going on. For intuitive simplicity, I will refer to the Chinese Person from now on, meaning the person who's memorized the contents of the book. I think this modification (which Searle himself suggested, so I'm not weakening his point any) serves to clarify the intuition just a little.

There have been countless attempts to argue against the Chinese room, find a flaw in the logic, and save the computational theory. The reason for this post is that the problem I've seen in the Chinese room for a while is one I haven't seen mentioned in the criticisms of it. That's not to say it hasn't been pointed out -- I just haven't seen it. So maybe this will be new to some people who already know, and even those who know to hate, Searle's argument.

The problem as I see it is that the book has to be not only readable, but writeable. No proponent of the computational theory has ever suggested anything like a hard-coded read-only set of commands. No one, not even Fodor, who is the most extreme nativist I know of, thinks that we don't learn anything throughout our lifetime. The computational idea is that the mind processes new information into, in some very unspecified sense, a set of symbols, which then modify its internal thought processes, which in turn modify the outputs it produces. Being writeable fits into the other feature that the book must have -- it must provide outputs in a generative way. No computational theorist would ever propose to model the mind as a stock series of canned responses. The book must, in fact, be constantly changing the output symbol it's ready to provide to any given input, based on previous inputs it received, the contents in the book already, preformance limitations, etc.

I don't see a way Searle could include writeability and generativity into the Chinese room argument without causing the intuition to fall apart. Imagine a third component of the system -- a set of instructions for how to rewrite the memory book. A metabook. A person memorizing this, and the original book would seem to have what the computational theory requires, but perhaps still be unable to understand Chinese. But, of course, there'd have to be a set of instructions to rewrite the metabook. At some point, early or late, one of the metabooks would need to have instructions for rewriting itself.

I don't know about you, but my intuition falls apart here. At some point, if we have a Chinese Person who has memorized the original book and all its companion metabooks, so that the Person can start legitimate conversations in Chinese, respond appropriately in a context-sensitive way, constantly adjust responses based not only on the Chinese words themselves, but also the speaker they originated from, the context, the weather, and a myriad other possible factors, and learn from interactions in a way that affects future conversations, I'd probably be willing to ascribe knowledge of Chinese to the whole system, er... person.

Unless understanding has to involve consciousness. And there, of course, Searle has me (and everyone else). Really, though, at that point, the argument is identical to Chalmers' zombie argument. I have to concede that unless we figure out what makes us conscious, we're not going to build a human being. But that seems to me to be a different argument than the one Searle wants to run. If I understand him correctly, what he wants to show is something more like, no robot we build or computational explanation we give will ever be able to work the same way people work. And that doesn't seem to follow. It's entirely conceivable to me that we humans works just like the Chinese Person, with an added element of consciousness and qualia, for all we know about these. In the end, if Searle's argument comes down only to the point that a robot copy of a person may still be missing qualia, I'd be willing to agree with him. But I'm not sure that the computational theory of mind suffers any.