Now, by playing with various knob settings, we can come up with various thought experiments. One choice yields the situation described in selection 26, “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain.” Another choice yields Searle’s Chinese room experiment. In particular, that involves the following knob settings:
Knob 1: paper and symbols
Knob 2: concepts and ideas
Knob 3: room size
Knob 4: human-sized demon
Knob 5: slow setting (one operation every few seconds)
Note that in principle Searle is not opposed to assuming that a simulation with these parameters could pass the Turing test. His dispute is only with what that would imply.
There is one final parameter that is not a knob but a point of view from which to look at the experiment. Let us add a little color to this drab experiment and say that the simulated Chinese speaker involved is a woman and that the demons (if animate) are always male. Now we have a choice between the demon’s-eye view and the system’s-eye view. Remember that by hypothesis, both the demon and the simulated woman are equally capable of articulating their views on whether or not they are understanding, and on what they are experiencing. Searle is insistent, nonetheless, that we see this experiment only from the point of view of the demon. He insists that no matter what the simulated woman claims (in Chinese, of course) about her understanding, we should disregard her claims, and pay attention to the demon inside, who is carrying out the symbol manipulation. Searle’s claim amounts to the notion that actually there is only one point of view, not two. If one accepts the way Searle describes the whole experiment, this claim has great intuitive appeal, since the demon is about our size, speaks our language, and works at about our speed—and it is very hard to identify with a “woman” whose answers come at the rate of one per century (with luck)—and in “meaningless squiggles and squoggles,” to boot.
But if we change some of the knob settings, we can also alter the ease with which we change point of view. In particular, Haugeland’s variation involves switching various knobs as follows:
Knob 1: neurons and chemicals
Knob 2: neural-firing level
Knob 3: brain size
Knob 4: eensy-weensy demon
Knob 5: dazzlingly fast demon
What Haugeland wants us to envision is this: A real woman’s brain is, unfortunately, defective. It no longer is able to send neurotransmitters from one neuron to another. Luckily, however, this brain is inhabited by an incredibly tiny and incredibly speedy Haugeland’s demon, who intervenes every single time any neuron would have been about to release neurotransmitters into a neighboring neuron. This demon “tickles” the appropriate synapse of the next neuron in a way that is functionally indistinguishable, to that neuron, from the arrival of genuine neurotransmitters. And the H-demon is so swift that he can jump around from synapse to synapse in trillionths of a second, never falling behind schedule. In this way the operation of the woman’s brain proceeds exactly as it would have, if she were healthy. Now, Haugeland asks Searle, does the woman still think—that is, does she possess intentionality—or, to recall the words of Professor Jefferson as cited by Turing, does she merely “artificially signal”?
You might expect Searle to urge us to listen to and identify with demon, and to eschew the Systems Reply, which would be, of course, to listen to and identify with the woman. But in his response to Haugeland, Searle surprises us—he chooses to listen to her this time and to ignore the demon who is cursing us from his tiny vantage point, yelling up to us, “Fools! Don’t listen to her! She’s merely a puppet whose every action is caused by my tickling, and by the program embedded in these many neurons that I zip around among.” But Searle does not heed the H. demon’s warning cries. He says, “Her neurons still have the right causal powers; they just need some help from the demon.”
We can construct a mapping between Searle’s original setup and this modified setup. To the “bits of paper” now correspond all the synapses in the woman’s brain. To the AI program written on these “bits of paper” corresponds the entire configuration of the woman’s brain; this amounts to a gigantic prescription telling the demon when and how to know which synapses to tickle. To the act of writing “meaningless squiggles and squoggles of Chinese” on paper corresponds the act of tickling her synapses. Suppose we take the setup as is, except that we’ll vary the size and speed knobs. We’ll blow the woman’s brain up to the size of the Earth, so that the demon becomes an “us-sized” S-demon, instead of a tiny H-demon. And let’s also have the S-demon act at speed reasonable for humans, instead of zipping thousands of miles throughout this bulbous brain in mere microseconds. Now which level does Searle wish us to identify with? We won’t speculate, but it seems to us that if the Systems Reply was compelling in the previous case, it should still be so, in this case.
It must be admitted that Searle’s thought experiment vividly raises the question of what understanding a language really is. We would like: to digress for a moment on that topic. Consider the question: “What kind of ability to manipulate the written or spoken symbols of a language amounts to a true understanding of that language?” Parrots who parrot English do not understand English. The recorded voice of a woman announcing the exact time of day on the telephone time service is not the mouthpiece of a system that understands English. There is no mentality behind that voice—it has been skimmed off of its mental substrate, yet retains a human-seeming quality. Perhaps a child would wonder how anyone could have so boring a job, and could do it so reliably. This would amuse us. It would be another matter, of course, if her voice were being driven by a flexible AI program that could pass the Turing test!
Imagine you are teaching a class in China. Further, imagine that you are aware of formulating all your thoughts in English and then of applying last-minute transformation rules (in reality, they would be last-split-second rules) that convert the English thoughts into instructions for moving your mouth and vocal cords in strange, “meaningless” ways—and yet, all your pupils sit there and seem quite satisfied with your performance. When they raise their hands, they utter exotic sounds that, although they are completely meaningless to you, you are equipped to deal with, as you quickly apply some inverse rules and recover the English meanings underlying them.... Would you feel you were actually speaking Chinese? Would you feel you had gained some insight into the Chinese mentality? Or—can you actually imagine this situation? Is it realistic? Could anyone actually speak a foreign language well using this method?
The standard line is “You must learn to think in Chinese.” But in what does this consist? Anyone who has experienced it will recognize this description: The sounds of the second language pretty soon become “unheard”—you hear right through them, rather than hearing them, as you see right through a window, rather than seeing the window. Of course, you can make yourself hear a familiar language as pure uninterpreted sound if you try very hard, just as you can look at a windowpane if you want; but you can’t have your cake and eat it too—you can’t hear the sounds both with and without their meanings. And so most of the time people hear mainly meaning. For those people who learn a language because of enchantment with its sounds, this is a bit disappointing—and yet mastery of those sounds, even if one no longer hears them naïvely, is a beautiful, exhilarating experience. (It would be an interesting thing to try to apply this same kind of analysis to the hearing of music, where the distinction between hearing bare sounds and hearing their “meanings” is far less well understood, yet seems very real.)