The Chinese Room Is Wrong, But Not for the Reason You Think
John Searle’s Chinese Room argument has haunted discussions of artificial intelligence for over four decades. The setup is elegant: imagine a person inside a room, following rules to manipulate Chinese characters. The person doesn’t understand Chinese—they’re just matching shapes and shuffling symbols according to a rulebook. Yet someone outside the room, sliding questions under the door and receiving coherent answers, would conclude the room contains a Chinese speaker. Searle’s conclusion: the room doesn’t understand Chinese, and by extension, no computer program can truly understand anything. Syntax is not semantics. ...