Thought today's smbc comic was too funny not to share. Source
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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...but does the system that is the Chinese Room (the entire system taken as a whole) understand Chinese?
Any given sufficiently small piece of your brain does not understand English, does no individual neuron in the language center of your brain understanding English mean that you do not understand English? If that understanding is held in the organization and structure of the brain but not in the individual parts, then why can't the Chinese Room understand Chinese despite no individual component understanding Chinese? That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer in a coherent fashion without asserting that knowledge in an organic brain is magical in some fashion, and nothing else counts.
Wait until you consider the concept of philosophical zombies, which is all about pointing out the edges and contours of the hard problem of consciousness. The starting point of that discussion is essentially "Is someone who responds exactly like a regular person would but has no actual subjective experience conscious?" and gets stranger from there.
I always thought it was a bit tragically amusing that LLMs can fool people so readily, because it was essentially proof that P-zombies can exist. And we invented them.
As for the Chinese Room and understanding Chinese, my argument has always been that the chart contains an understanding of Chinese - but as the chart itself cannot think, it does not understand Chinese in the way a person does, and as each person who is in the Chinese Room does not - and cannot - glean meaning from the input they receive or the output that they send out, they have no understanding at all. Understanding also implies being able to adapt the knowledge to new situations, and as the chart that drives the Chinese Room is immutable and cannot accomodate novel scenarios, it does not understand Chinese.