Comment:

As famous philosophical thought experiments go, the Chinese room is a pretty easy one to parse, especially now that we have computers that can literally do the same thing. Text goes in, response text comes out, the person "speaking" is whoever made the room, not the hands moving paper around, that's pretty self-evident. It really only muddies the waters when the room gives its human options (or, I suppose, the human starts making mistakes).

Transcript:

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0421– 2167/07/07/12:26 - Lee Caldavera's apartment, bedroom
LC: Okay, enough about luck and my heartfelt religious belief in your soul, which I have. What’s so Chinese about this room?
Zoa: Right. Chinese room, the room that is Chinese.
Zoa: Well, you’re in this room, and you have all these books filled with phrases in Chinese.
LC: Mandarin?
Zoa: Sure.
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Zoa: A slip of paper comes through a slot in the door, and it has writing on it in Mandarin. You look up that phrase in the books, and it doesn’t translate it to English for you, but it does give you a number.
Zoa: You cross-reference that number in another book, and it gives you a response that’s also in Mandarin. You write that response on a slip of paper and feed it back.
Zoa: This continues, back and forth. You’re having a conversation with the other party in Mandarin, though at no point do you, the human in the middle, have any idea what is being said.
Zoa: Does the system, as a whole, speak and understand Mandarin?
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LC: I guess that depends on how much I trust whoever wrote these reference books.
Zoa: What?
LC: Yeah. I mean, I’m just a processing unit for the decisions they’ve already made, they’re the one that’s having the conversation. The writer of the books is the person talking.
LC: And, I suppose, if I wrote all the lookup tables for a similar English room, then I could have a conversation with them and they could have a conversation with me, but with me talking as them and them talking as me.
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Doc: Except that you’d be feeding them responses in a language they already speak.
LC: Well, maybe there’s an actual translator in the middle, changing my Mandarin to their English and their English to my Mandarin.
Zoa: Seems somewhat inefficient, but you do you, I guess.
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