Chinese room

plural Chinese rooms

1. The setting of a thought experiment in which a person with no understanding of the Chinese language is locked in a room with a set of rules allowing them to produce answers to questions in Chinese. It aims to demonstrate that running a program cannot give a computer system a "mind", "understanding" or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligent it may appear.

   1 more example

   So, is Searle correct that the Chinese room cannot be conscious? Many critics have zeroed in on a crucial step in the argument: that the person who is manipulating symbols in the room doesn't understand Chinese. For them, the salient issue is not whether anyone in the room understands Chinese, but whether the system as a whole understands Chinese: the person plus the cards, book, room, and so on.

   2019, Susan Schneider, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Princeton University Press, page 21