Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

experiment, people write questions in Chinese symbols and pass them through a
slot into a room. Later, answers to these questions, again written in Chinese symbols,
are passed back to the questioner. The philosophical import of the Chinese
room arises when one looks into the room to see how it works.
Inside the Chinese room is a native English speaker—Searle himself—who
knows no Chinese, and for whom Chinese writing is a set of meaningless squiggles.
The room contains boxes of Chinese symbols, as well as a manual for how
to put these together in strings. The English speaker is capable of following these
instructions, which are the room’s algorithm. When a set of symbols is passed into
the room, the person inside can use the instructions and put together a new set of
symbols to pass back outside. This is the case even though the person inside the
room does not understand what the symbols mean, and does not even know that the
inputs are questions and the outputs are answers. Searle (1980) uses this example to
challengingly ask where in this room is the knowledge of Chinese? He argues that it
is not to be found, and then uses this point to argue against strong claims about the
possibility of machine intelligence.
But should we expect to see such knowledge if we were to open the door to the
Chinese room and peer inside? Given our current discussion of the architecture, it
would perhaps be unlikely to answer this question affirmatively. This is because if
we could look inside the “room” of a calculating device to see how it works—to see
how its physical properties bring its calculating abilities to life—we would not see
the input-output mapping, nor would we see a particular algorithm in its entirety.
At best, we would see the architecture and how it is physically realized in the calculator.
The architecture of a calculator (e.g., the machine table of a Turing machine)
would look as much like the knowledge of arithmetic calculations as Searle and
the instruction manual would look like knowledge of Chinese. However, we would
have no problem recognizing the possibility that the architecture is responsible for
producing calculating behaviour!
Because the architecture is simply the primitives from which algorithms are
constructed, it is responsible for algorithmic behaviour—but doesn’t easily reveal
this responsibility on inspection. That the holistic behaviour of a device would not
be easily seen in the actions of its parts was recognized in Leibniz’ mill, an early
eighteenth-century ancestor to the Chinese room.
In his Monadology, Gottfried Leibniz wrote:
Supposing there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation,
and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions
until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on
going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would
he find anything to explain Perception. It is accordingly in the simple substance,
50 Chapter 2