Refuting the Chinese Room Argument

This post assumes you already know about the Chinese Room Argument developed by John Searle.

Before I refute it, let's begin with a simple explanation of what the experiment entails:

• A person who understands Chinese writes down a message using Chinese characters and places it into the mail slot of a room. The person cannot observe anything about the room's contents including what is going on inside of it.
• Inside the room is John Searle, he has buckets of Chinese symbols and a book that describes for each combination of Chinese symbols, English instructions on how to arrange the Chinese symbols in the buckets onto a piece of paper which he send back out through the same mail slot. Searle, himself has no understanding of Chinese, he blindly follows the instruction in the book.
• The person outside the room, reads the message from Searle and because it's content and the fact that it is written in Chinese is then convinced that there must be a person who understands Chinese in the room.
• Because Searle never understands Chinese, he is only performing syntactic symbol manipulation. There is no semantics going on. Without semantics there can be no strong AI.

Let me now write the steps of the thought experiment down so it's clear before I make changes to them:

1. Chinese speaker writes down message, places it in mail slot
2. Searle looks at message, thumbs through book to find matching page
3. Searle follows the instructions on the page to form a response
4. Searle places the response back through the mail slot
5. Chinese speaker reads Searle's message and concludes Searle understands Chinese

Now suppose we make a small alteration to the experiment, but in a way that you shall see is immaterial to the experiment itself.

• Suppose that the room has a 2nd mail slot on the back wall that leads to a 2nd room. Just as the Chinese speaker cannot see into Searle's room, Searle cannot see into the 2nd room. Additionally, to the Chinese speaker, the original room and this room are identical (conceptually the original room is divided into 2 rooms internally).
• The book that Searle uses is also different. It still contains all the same Chinese symbols except now, the place where there were English instructions is blank.
• Searle however can now tear out that page from his book and place it into the 2nd mail slot and within a negligible amount of time, the page will be returned through the same slot with the previously missing English instructions. Assume these instructions match the instructions in the original experiment.

So now let's write these new steps down:

1. Chinese speaker writes down message, places it in mail slot
2. Searle looks at message, thumbs through book to find matching page
1. Searle tears out the page and places it into 2nd mail slot
2. The page is returned with the instructions on it
3. Searle puts the page back into his book
3. Searle follows the instructions on the page to form a response
4. Searle places the response back through the mail slot
5. Chinese speaker reads Searle's message and concludes Searle understands Chinese

As you can see, the additional steps we added are inconsequential to the experiment. Whether the page already had the instructions on it or whether Searle performs an extra step using purely syntactical operations to get that instruction, the result is the same. Searle still doesn't understand Chinese, so we must conclude there is no Chinese understanding going on and thus strong AI is false.

But wait! I haven't told you what was in the 2nd room

Inside the 2nd room was a person who understands both Chinese & English. He/she used their understanding of Chinese to formulate a response in Chinese, then used their understanding of English to create the necessary instructions for Searle to construct that response.

So what's the problem?

The Chinese room is an analog for a Turing Machine (aka digital computer). By having Searle in essence "be the computer", the idea is that if Searle never understands Chinese, then all computers for which he is an analog for would never understand Chinese either. The test requires that if Chinese understanding were to exist in the Chinese room, then it must be within Searle. Is that true though? Because, didn't we just show that understanding could definitively be in the Chinese room and entirely separate from Searle?

A test that fails to detect what it's meant to detect, shouldn't be used to infer anything.

Systems Reply?

Some may point to Searle's systems reply as a rebuttal. Namely that Searle could internalize the content of the book (with the instructions). However doing so results in the same conclusion that he made --> Searle doesn't understand Chinese and that's precisely the point. In this case, where we know Chinese understanding exists, we'd want Searle to then understand Chinese (not only that the same understanding of Chinese as the person in the 2nd room).

I don't believe the 2 experiments are truly identical, surely their difference is consequential

Okay, lets have the same person from the 2nd room go through the entire book filling out the instructions, then and only after doing all of them, he places the book in Searle's original room and leaves. The Chinese room starts off indistinguishably from the original. The room, book, people are all the same. The only difference being the author of the book. In the original it's a programmer, in the 2nd it's the person who understands Chinese and English. 

Can we have free will and an omniscient God?

This is a fascinating and long debated idea. Except for a very few people on this planet, I think the concept of why there is a problem with these two ideas co-existing sits a bit over the heads of most people. I hope I can make the ideas a little easier to understand and share my own views about it.

So what is free will?
I'd like to use the concept of divine free will which means that somehow God gave man the ability to make choices outside of pure cause and effect relationships. For example, if I punch you, you don't automatically punch me back. You in-fact choose whether you want to punch me back or not and do so accordingly. However, as we learn more about our biology we can start to trace the cause effect relationships in much finer details and sometimes what appears to be free will may actually be a cause and effect relationship in the biology of our brains. That is to say, that if we knew our brains were in a particular state and we also know everything about how the brain works then one could determine what choice that brain will make with absolute certainty. If this is true, then we don't have divine free will, we are just slaves to our biology. People call this biological predeterminism.
   On the other hand, if you knew everything about a brain and still the choice that that brain makes is still uncertain, then I consider that free will. Despite the biological or chemical state of mind, the choices made are independent of them. They don't have to be 100% independent (if you take happy drugs, then you tend to make happy choices) but so long as its not 100% influenced by it then you don't have biological predeterminism. This biological predeterminism creates the illusion of free will not actual free will.
  Divine free will, then should be the absence of all predeterminism in the choices you make. Nothing that happens before your choice should have complete control over what choice is made.

Omniscience?
Omniscience is knowing everything, but most importantly (for our discussion) it is having perfect knowledge of the future. It's not enough to know what "might" happen. One must know what "will" happen with absolute certainty. To know the future with certainty, one must know the outcomes of all free-will choices from all points in time prior to that future. Otherwise, the future would not play out as foreseen (and thus there would not be perfect knowledge of the future).

So what's the problem?
Let's go back to our biological predeterminism example. If you recall, if we knew everything about our brains and can determine with with 100% success what choice will be made, then we don't have free will. If only person A can predict the brain of person B with 100% accuracy, then person B has no free will. He will always be a slave to biological predeterminism. Person A can be anybody as long as its somebody with the power to do the prediction. Additionally, Person A need not use knowledge of the brain to make the prediction. Any knowledge, that guarantees a prediction proves that some form of predeterminism is taking place, thus it is not free will. So to complete the picture, suppose God is person A and he uses his perfect knowledge of the future to predict what person B will choose, then person B has no free will. And if person B is every person, then we can conclude that no person has free will.

False Objections
The seemingly logical conclusions that I'm providing have been challenged by a couple ill-fated attempts. In the end I'll present my most compelling reason why these 2 concepts can logically co-exist. However it's good to also debunk many of these weak arguments otherwise they will just get repeated here. (See wikipedia link: Argument from free will)

• Redefining "Free will" - The argument is that free will is only the freedom from coercion. In a sense, it is the idea that God will get out of the way of man's attempt to make choices. So long as God does not interfere in the process then man has free will. I think this redefinition only serves to undermine the real essence of what divine free will is. This definition is so loose that practically everything has free will: humans, animals, computers, programs, rocks, and dirt all would have free will. This provides no real satisfaction for those who want to believe that free will is any sort of divine gift to mankind. Additionally, this redefinition does nothing to negate predeterminism from the human free will. It's perfectly okay for humans to be slaves to their biological processes, and the conditions that lead up to that biological state. This poses a critical problem for a God that is both omniscient and that created the universe. This is because at the point of creation, human choice will be governed by the initial state of the universe, which if designed by God would mean that it was God's choice, not man's. To make this easier to understand, imagine if the universe was a table full of dominoes standing on their edges. To start time in this universe God simply knocks over the first domino and initiates the chain reaction. If you could see this table, you could probably guess what the pattern would look like after all the dominoes have fallen. An omniscient god however, would know for certain how and when each domino would fall. Similarly, God could rearrange the dominoes in any pattern and still he would know exactly how that would affect the outcome of each and every domino. Now let's look at a single domino, one near the end of the chain reaction. Even though God doesn't directly cause it to fall over one way or another (no coercion), it still can't help but to fall based on the physical laws that govern it. In this case do consider the domino to have free will? More importantly, who's will do we see the domino taking? I would say that the domino fall is chosen by the person who placed the domino and the dominoes preceding it. Now suppose we replace the dominoes with people and things and the physical laws with all the laws that govern the universe. The people and thing's choices would still be governed by the laws of the universe and hence their choices are ultimately decided by the God that provided the initial state of the universe. Note: I know it seems like a big leap to compare humans to dominoes, but this is essentially what predeterminism is. If I can tell by what state your brain is at this moment (lets call now T0) what choice you will make in the next second (lets call that T+1), then I need only recreate your brain and the universe in that same exact state to "make" you choose the same choice. Now lets say that I also know that if your brain was in a particular state one second before "now" (T-1) then it would naturally change state to match what it is now (T0). So this means I can also recreate your brain and the rest of the universe at the state of T-1 and still get you to pick the same choice at T+1. Now imagine that I simply repeated this process, I could recreate the state at T-2 and still you'd make the same choice at T+1. Do this again for T-3 and so on. I could actually keep repeating this until the beginning of time and no matter what, you will always make the same choice at T+1. So if God creates everything at the beginning of time knowing that you have no choice but to make the same decision at T+1, are you expressing free will or God's will? This is why if we allow predeterminism, then people become dominoes.
• Redefining "Omniscience" - There seems to be two prevailing arguments that attempt to redefine "Omniscience". One is that God only knows all that is possible for God to know. I find this a bit weak. This equates to defining omniscience as "that which God knows" (hopefully you see the problem with that logic). The other argument is that God knows all the possible outcomes of as a result of all our future free will choices, but does not know which choice we will make. Unfortunately, allowing omniscience to include not knowing something is contradictory.
• "God is outside of time" - The claim is that my logic relies on time and God exists outside of our construct of time and is able to perceive all moments of time simultaneously. This argument is flawed because, regardless of how God perceives time he still perceives all of it, and all of it perfectly. Still no person can choose to do anything different from what God perceives they will do. Lets revisit our table lined with dominos metaphor. God could start our time by knocking over the first domino, starting a chain reaction. He knows even before starting the chain reaction (start of our time) what is going to happen. Every domino will fall a particular way known to him. Also imagine that God could even fast forward or rewind back time so he could see any point in time of this tabletop domino universe. No matter how many times he rewinds and plays back in our time, the same results happen. Thus we have still have no real choice, despite God being clearly outside "our time".

Wait there is a way!

So far, I have shown that omniscience and free will cannot coexist especially if our choices are the result of predeterminism. However today as a result of quantum physics, we know that the universe is not a completely predeterministic system. That is to say that at some level I can recreate the state of something and at a future date, no matter what instruments or knowledge that I have right now, I will never have the ability to predict its future with absolute certainty (See double-slit experiment). The very act of knowing enough to predict changes the outcome so as to prevent the initial prediction from occuring. This is very important to understand. The laws of the universe are literally preventing us least from complete physical predeterminism. So let's suppose that there's something in our brains that functions like quantum particles and its this non-deterministic system that is the root of our free will. We could then conclude that we are not subject to biological predetermination. However this doesn't quite let us off the hook just yet. We haven't eliminated all forms of predetermination. An omniscient God would still know how the quantum elements of our brains would behave and thus we would still make the same choices accordingly.What we need is a way for us to not be forced into a particular choice, yet allow God to still know what one choice we will make. How can we accommodate these two seemingly incompatible ideas?

Many Worlds

Coincidentally, quantum physics has another solution to this problem. All this time we have been assuming that there is only one universe and only one timeline of events that will unfold. This may seem the case in our point of view, but we must remember that God could easily exist in a completely different point of view, just like our table of dominoes. The dominoes only experience what has happened to them in the past. They would be oblivious to any other arrangement of dominos, however God would be fully aware of all other arrangements that he had made. So to bridge our logical dilemma, what if God could be omniscient of 2 universes: one where you made choice #1 and another where you made choice #2? In a sense, you have simultaneous chosen both options even if those options are mutually exclusive in a single universe (throw a punch/don't throw a punch). In quantum physics, there is a theory, known as the Many Worlds Interpretation, which states that when you reach a point where a quantum choice is made, the universe splits into however many possible choices where each universe is the result of one of those choices. This fits perfectly with what we want. Instead of God having omniscience of a definitive single universe and timeline, he has omniscience of every universe and every timeline. Our assumption that our future has a single timeline is what makes free will and omniscience seem incompatible. Is this really free will or just the illusion of one? I would have to say yes this is real free will, in that the only prediction that is made is that you will make all choices and you were never constrained to make only one of them.

What does this all mean? Is there a god or not?

From a philosophical standpoint, I hope this gets you to think about things you haven't thought about before. Is Many Worlds the solution that God uses to solve this dilemma? Who knows? It would be a pretty elegant one if it was. Does God exist? I don't know either and I don't think this essay shows one way or another. I'm only exposing a possibility which is logically compatible with what we know today.

Why Prof. John Searle is Wrong!
In Philosophy we talk about a lot of things like Do we exist? or How do we know that we're alive? At one point, Philosophy and Computer Science met and opened up a whole can of worms. People started asking questions like What is thinking?, Could we tell if our brains really are stuck in a Matrix like in the movie?, and Are we biological machines? The topic that most interested me was Can Machines Ever Think?

The Turing Test
We can't talk about thinking machines without first talking about Alan Turing. Alan Turing was British mathematician often cited as the Father of Computer Science. In fact, the computers we use today are called Turing Machines in computer science lingo. Turing also thought about whether machines would ever think, but before he could do that, he had to answer the question of How can we tell that a machine is thinking? To answer this question, Turing devised a test. Suppose that you had two rooms that you could not look into. In one room there was a person and in another room there was a machine that would try to answer questions like a human would. Then, without know who/what was in each room, another person (the tester) would write some questions on a piece of paper and slide it underneath each door, and whoever/whatever was in the room would try to answer the question in such a way as to seem as human as possible by writing the response on another piece of paper and sliding it back under the door. If the tester was unable to determine which room contained the machine after several rounds of questions then the machine passes the Turing Test and can be deemed intelligent by Turing's standards.

The Chinese Room Argument
John Searle is a Philosophy professor at the Univ. of California, Berkeley who came up with a mental experiment to show that even if you could make a program that would pass the Turing Test, it still couldn't be intelligent because the program is mindlessly following instructions. Searle says that the program would lack intentionality and cognitive states which he believes are requirements to demonstrating intelligence. Here is the original text The argument asks you to pretend that there is a non-Chinese speaker in a closed room. Someone can write a Chinese question, slip it under the door and the guy inside will lookup a bunch of rule books on how to process these symbols into Chinese answers and push them back out under the door.
You can read it yourself, but the main point of the argument is suppose the guy in the room becomes so efficient at processing those rules and producing Chinese answers that to people outside the room, he would appear to be a Chinese speaking person. The Chinese room would then pass the Turing Test, but since the person doesn't understand Chinese and rules by themselves cannot think, we must conclude that Strong AI (or machines that can think at the level that we do) cannot exist.

This, however, is a false conclusion. Whether or not the man inside the room understands Chinese has no bearing on whether the program executed by the man can understand Chinese.

Let me elaborate with a more simple example. Hopefully you still know how to do long multiplication. If you remember, skip to the next paragraph. If you don't remember, you stack the two numbers that you want to multiply on top of one another, then you take the right most digit of the bottom number and multiply that with all the digits of the top number whilst doing the appropriate carry over. This partial product is written below the numbers to be multiplied. Once you're done with the bottom right most digit, you repeat the process with the digit next to it, but write down the partial product offset one digit to the left of the previous partial product. Then when all thats done, you add up all the partial products assuming you consider all the offset digits in the partial products are zero. This sum is the product of the two original numbers... whew!!!

Okay, now you know how to do long multiplication, but do you understand long multiplication? Do you know what the partial products are for or why you got to offset them. Do you know why you have to carry over when multiplying by a single digit? If you can't answer these questions, then you don't understand long multiplication, you only know how to follow the instructions. What if you got really good at following those instructions and were able to do long multiplication in your head, would you be any better at understanding long multiplication? No.

Now here's the pseudo-paradox that Searle wants to convince you of. Let me apply Searle's argument to long multiplication: Suppose you could exhibit the same behavior of someone who understands long multiplication by simply showing that you can compute the answer, but although, you appear to understand long mulitplication, you don't actually understand it, therefore the long multiplication process can never understand long multiplication.

Unfortunately, we know that people are able to do long multiplication without understanding it so this cannot be a paradox. If this is not a paradox, we must conclude that the process does understand long multiplication. Thus, Searle's argument proves nothing.

You're probably saying "Huh? That doesn't make sense" right about now, right? Let me explain how I can compare long multiplication to real human thought.