The Chinese Room: Are Computers Conscious?

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You wake up in a small room. There’s a door with a slot at the bottom, a large binder, and a pen. As your eyes adjust to the bright light, a piece of paper slides under the door. You reach over and see that it’s covered in Chinese characters. Confused, you go open the huge binder: it’s a huge list of instructions written in English. The first instruction tells you to write a list of Chinese characters if you see a certain string of characters written on the paper. You notice that the Chinese on the paper and in the instruction match, and so you carefully draw out the corresponding lines of Chinese. After this, you pass the paper back under the door, only for it to return with more Chinese written on it. 

This goes on for hours, with you referring back to the binder to know what to write, until the door opens and a Chinese man pokes his head in. He looks surprised, saying, “Wow, you speak Chinese very fluently!” Of course, he says this in Chinese, so it’s lost on you. All this time, he thought he was speaking with a native Chinese speaker, but you were only manipulating symbols according to a set of rules.

Forgetting about why you might find yourself in this kind of situation, it’s an argument that can actually teach us a lot about machine consciousness. For John Searle—the creator of this argument—it proves that it’s impossible for computers to be conscious.

Here’s how: in the Chinese Room, you are the computer’s processor and the binder of instructions are the “program.” The Chinese writings given to you from beneath the door are the “input,” and your responses are the “output.” In this way, Searle’s Chinese Room represents the basic functions of a computer. 

Now, the question at the centre of all this has to do with whether the person inside the Chinese Room is able to speak Chinese or not. The answer to this question will answer another, more important one: Is a computer that appears to be conscious actually conscious, or just faking it? We’ve all seen computers “acting” very lifelike, whether they be in science-fiction or in real-life. Apple’s Siri can hold a reasonably complex conversation about anything from the weather to how to bake apple pie.

But does Siri really know how to bake? They might appear like they know, but to Searle, they’re faking it just as much as the person in the Chinese Room is faking knowing Chinese. Whenever Siri is asked a question, it refers to its own binder of instructions—the internet—and then regurgitates whatever it finds there.

It might sound very convincing, and it might respond so quickly you could swear another human was speaking for it, but at its core it is just a machine running a complex program at a speed sufficient enough to fool you. Just like the person inside the Chinese Room, programs like Siri aren’t aware of the symbols and concepts they’re controlling. They’re just following a bunch of rules.

So next time you worry that robots are going to take over, have no fear: they might be terrifying, but they won’t be conscious of it. That’s some consolation, if there is any.

If you’re hankering for more information on Searle’s “Chinese Room,” check out a paper written on it at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

And if you’re looking to learn about a similar thought-experiment, I wrote a two-part blog series on the “Ship of Theseus Paradox,” which you can read here.

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Matthew Montopoli

Matt is in his second year of Algonquin’s Professional Writing program. He enjoys writing, editing, reading history and philosophy, and not talking about himself.

The Ship of Theseus: What makes you, you? (Part 2 of 2)

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If you haven’t, go check out Part 1!

Picking up where we left off: if we look back at our answers to the original problem, we might not feel so confident about either one, right? I’d hope so, because neither side truly resolves the problem. If we look at the first answer — that Ship A and Ship B are different because their physical makeup aren’t the same — then we have to believe that we also aren’t the same person we were seven years ago.

But that doesn’t feel right. Although our personalities might change a lot in seven years, most people probably believe that there is something that truly makes them them, and that this “something” has been there for their entire life. They might call it many things — their soul, their mind, or just their character — but in the end everyone has a sense of it.

But some people might have trouble agreeing with the existence of souls and all these vague ideas about “underlying qualities.” For them, the science is clear, and the science says that we are never the same thing; that we are constantly changing. But there also might be some facts that allow a compatibility between the two differing ideas.

You might remember in Part 1 that I didn’t say that every part of your body is replaced every seven years. I actually said almost every part. It just so happens that this irreplaceable part is also the most important organ in your body: your brain. Unfortunately for us, our neurons don’t regenerate. But on the other hand, our brain cells last a very long time. Once our brain stops growing in our mid-20s, the neurons we have at twenty-five will be the same neurons that will carry us all the way to old age. So unlike your hand, which will be replaced many times in your life, your brain will always remain.

What does this mean for the scientifically-minded person? Well, it should mean that there is no problem: everything that makes you you, like your memories, are stored in your brain. And since the brain never physically changes then neither do you.

However, I don’t think it’s so simple to separate our bodies from our brains, given that they are fundamentally linked and can’t exist without each other. On top of that, are memories really the best basis for your identity given that they are never set in stone and often wither away in old age? Does that mean that as you grow older, you become less and less of your original self? And let’s not even mention what might lie in the future with cybernetic brain enhancement. Will you still be yourself when half of your brain is machine? What about when it is completely cybernetic? 

Unfortunately, I’m out of time! These are questions you’ll have to wrestle with on your own.

In the end, it seems the only fact about ourselves that never changes is that we are always changing. As Heraclitus says, “It is not possible to step twice into the same river, or to come into contact twice with a mortal-being in the same state.”

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Matthew Montopoli

Matt is in his second year of Algonquin’s Professional Writing program. He enjoys writing, editing, reading history and philosophy, and not talking about himself.

The Ship of Theseus: What makes you, you? (Part 1 of 2)

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Imagine this for a second: you have a job at a history museum, working on preserving a large wooden ship. When it was first stored in the museum each of its wooden planks were fairly new. But as time goes on, some of the planks start to rot. Your job is to replace the rotting planks. So you diligently do your job until, suddenly, you realize that you’ve replaced every plank in the ship. There’s nothing left that was original. It might look like the same old ship the day it was brought to the museum, but it’s not made out of the same wood. So the question is: “Is it the same ship at the end?”

That’s the conundrum at the core of the “Ship of Theseus” paradox. It might seem pretty simple to figure out at the start. But after looking closer, you might not feel so confident; especially once you think about some of the larger implications.

Let’s start off with a simple response, the one you probably thought of first. “You’re such a dummy, Matt,” you say. “It’s obvious they’re not the same ships since they have a completely different physical makeup.” And you would be right, my inquisitive friend. It’s plain that Ship A (the original one) isn’t the same as Ship B (the restored one) since their essential atomic structure is different. And we could easily walk away from this so-called “paradox,” baffled at how someone could be stumped by it.

On the other hand is an equally strong point of view. “It’s ridiculous to say that they’re different ships,” another person might say. “They may be made of different things, but there was always an underlying part of the ship that kept it what it is: its form. Its shape was always the same, so it was always the same ship.” Again, another interesting perspective.

But I don’t think this example is concrete enough for us to really sink our teeth into. Besides, who cares if a new wooden ship is or isn’t the same as an old one? What we need is something more personal, more intimate.

And there isn’t anything more intimate than ourselves and our bodies. Anyone who’s gotten a scab over a scrape knows that their body is always replacing old cells: skin cells are constantly scraped off, and old blood cells are programmed to die once they grow old. In fact, almost every part of your body will be replaced after seven years. As well, nearly three-hundred million of our body’s cells die every minute—that’s five million every second! You are, in many ways, a living, breathing Ship of Theseus.

Read more about the “Ship of Theseus paradox” and what it could mean for your identity in Part 2.

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Matthew Montopoli

Matt is in his second year of Algonquin’s Professional Writing program. He enjoys writing, editing, reading history and philosophy, and not talking about himself.