"Chinese Room"

"Suppose I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing. Suppose furthermore .... that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken, and that ... I could not recognize Chinese writing as Chinese writing ... Now suppose further that ... I am given ... a set of rules ... in English ... They enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols ... [T]hese rules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response to certain sorts of shapes ... [F]rom the point of view of somebody outside the room ... my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. ... I produce the answers by manipulating uninterpreted formal symbols. ... I simply behave like a computer ..." (P 278bff)


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Richard Lee, rlee@uark.edu, last modified: 16 November 2002