Imagine a hallway containing three different rooms. In each room, there is a person being
experimented on—a captive subject to a rogue, clandestine operation headed by the world’s
greatest, most intelligent neuroscientist. This neuroscientist has been contracted
by an intelligence agency group to research consciousness, perception, and intelligence,
all in an effort to develop new understandings and technologies related to the mind. In each room,
we find brains running experiments on brains, experiments run on thought.
As we enter the hallway, we find ourselves at the first room. The door is closed and locked. Inside,
there is a man named John. He is not allowed out, and no one is allowed in. He has been
completely isolated for some time, provided food and water through a contactless delivery system.
A woman who works at the lab has now recently been instructed to begin periodically communicating
with John by slipping him notes under his door. She is not told anything else. She does not know
who is in the room or why. One morning, after she begins following this instruction, John wakes up
to a note in his room. He is both immediately curious and hopeful of what it might say. However,
to great disappointment, when he picks it up to read it, he finds that it is written in Chinese—a
language he does not know at all. However, John quickly notices that now also placed
in his room are boxes full of papers, pencils, and erasers, as well as books containing comprehensive
instructions for how to appropriately respond in Chinese to statements and questions the woman
might write. In the books, John can locate and match the symbols the woman writes and then write
the relevant corresponding symbols that the book provides, facilitating a conversation. At first,
John is confused, but desperate for social interaction, he soon engages with the woman,
writing back notes according to the books’ instructions. As time passes,
the woman begins to like and then fall for John, believing she is communicating with a charismatic
man who is fluent in Chinese. Of course, however, John has no idea what he is saying.
In this experiment, referred to as the Chinese Room, we find the following question being asked:
what does it means to be intelligent? With the advent and rapid development of digital computing
and artificial intelligence, the question concerning when
or if a machine could be considered intelligent, able to think and possess an understanding,
is only becoming increasingly relevant. If John can convince the woman he is intelligent,
or fluent in Chinese, based on what he outputs from the room, but can do so without ever actually
understanding Chinese and what he is saying, then the output of John’s behavior is not sufficient
in qualifying him as intelligent, or in this case, possessing an actual understanding of
what he is saying. And so, likewise, if a computer program can follow syntactic rules well enough to
provide an output that can convince a person that it is thinking and fully understanding,
that does not necessarily mean that it is. This experiment challenges the philosophical positions
known as functionalism and computationalism, functionalism arguing that mental states are to
be identified by what they do rather than by what they are made of, and computationalism arguing
that the mind is an information processing system and consciousness is merely a form of computation.
According to the Chinese Room’s proposition, however, for intelligence of mind to actually
exist, there needs to be understanding, which is inevitably always missing from a digital computer.
This poses the question, though, what constitutes understanding? Obviously,
John understanding Chinese or not is essentially binary, but can John still understand
what he is doing in the situation without understanding Chinese? In other words,
does John’s understanding of the fact that he is intaking and sending out messages in Chinese
still constitute some form of understanding? On what level is a computational system required
to understand what it is doing for it to be considered sufficient enough for intelligence?
Is it a total, comprehensive understanding that is required, a partial understanding in
a specific way? How does one determine this? How does one verify it? After all, do we,
as human, really understand what we mean even when we know what we are saying?
Ultimately, if the door to John’s room was suddenly opened, and the woman saw John showing
emotion and effort as he wrote his responses down from the instruction books, clearly understanding,
not the language, but the significance of it, his role in the exchange, would this change
things? Would the woman still find him worthy of love and possessing of a sufficient enough
understanding to be intelligent? Likewise, if a machine functioned as if it understood,
behaved as if it did, and made the explicit claim that it felt as though it did, all based
on a programs code, do we believe it, how do we treat it, what are the ethics now needed?
As we move further down the hall, in the next room, there is a woman named Mary. Mary has been
contained in this room ever since she was born, completely closed off from the rest of the world.
No one has gone in, and she has never been let out. She has been communicated with exclusively
through an intercom system. Inside the room, there is no color, and there never has been. It is
completely black and white. Her skin and hair have all been modified and dyed black, white, and grey.
Through a delivery system, she has only been given food and drink completely dyed with black & white
food coloring. The only other things in the room that she has been given to pass the time
are books and research papers, all also in black and white. Contained inside the books and papers
is all of the known knowledge on one subject: color perception. Without having ever seen a color
in her entire life, Mary has become an expert on color. She knows everything there is to know—the
physics of it, the process by which different wavelengths of light stimulate the retina in
the eye, how it triggers different electrical signals that effect neural activity in the brain,
and how the brain interprets these signals into conscious experiences
in the forms of different color perceptions. Soon, however, the door to Mary’s room will be opened,
and she will be let out. For the first time in her life, she will see color firsthand. The question
this experiment will then ask is when Mary leaves the room, will she learn anything new about color?
If she already possesses and understands all of the known knowledge on color perception,
is there still something unknown to her contained in experiencing it firsthand via the eye?
This experiment, referred to as Mary’s Room, attempts to demonstrate what is
known as the knowledge argument, which is the claim that there are truths related to
conscious experience that cannot be described or known by mere knowledge of physical facts.
In other words, there is a property of knowledge and understanding
that can only be found through firsthand conscious experience,
which, according to the argument, extends beyond the mere physicality of the experience.
This argues against the theory known as physicalism, which is the counter view that argues
that everything in the universe, including mental states, is physical with physical explanations.
The belief that Mary will experience and learn something novel when seeing color
for the first time might seem obvious, but if she does, what exactly is it that is new?
If the experience is tied to something physical, she, at least theoretically, should have already
known it. If it is not physical, what is it? Is it the mental state felt by the color?
But what is being felt other than the physical state in the brain that the color produces in the
form of a mental state, which again, Mary should have, or at least could have, already known?
If she knows all the characteristic of a mental state through knowledge, wouldn’t she already know
how it feels? Perhaps, then, this experiment is and will remain restricted by the limits
of language and knowledge itself. Perhaps rather than any ineffable quality of subjective conscious
experience, Mary will demonstrate that language, as a vehicle of thought and understanding,
is simply far too limited to get near the mental state equivalent to firsthand experience,
but nonetheless, theoretically, with advanced enough language, it would be possible.
As we move down to the end of the hallway, in the final room
is you. Your brain currently floats in a stasis tube of nutrient solution.
Wires are implanted into it and plugged into a machine that actively processes and stimulates
all of your brain’s nerve impulses. Everything you are experiencing right now is mapped, modeled,
and created by this machine, your brain being stimulated into sequences of various mental
states that reproduce your regular perceptions. You are not in the world as you think you are.
You are not in your body. You are not physically encountering any environment through any senses.
Your memory is actively being altered and updated to create cohesiveness in the story
you imagine about yourself in order to make this illusion completely and constantly believable.
Of course, all of these are just thought experiments. But the point of this last one is to
pose the question: how can you know for sure? How can you know that all of the aforementioned—the
vat, the lab, the neuroscientist, and so on—isn’t actually happening right now
and what you think is happening right now actually isn’t? What can you really know with certainty
to be true? Can you be certain that anything exists outside your mind? Can you be certain
of the nature and conditions of your mind? Can you be certain your senses are not deceiving you,
that you are awake and not dreaming, that you are in the real world and not a simulation
or a vat? Isn’t the only thing you can be certain of is that you are somewhere somehow in something,
existing as a thinking thing? Since all your abilities to think and know occur exclusively
inside your mind, there is no way for you to ever step out of it to know or prove of anything else.
All of the ideas and questions found in this hallway of thought experiments,
The Chinese Room created by John Searle in 1980, Mary’s Room created by Frank Jackson in 1982,
and The Brain in a Vat created by Gilbert Harman in 1973, inspired by Rene Descartes’s Evil Demon,
reveal the inherent difficulty of understanding the mind from within the mind. They reveal how
little we truly know about what makes us who we are. They reveal the potential limits of thought,
language, and knowledge as vehicles fast and powerful enough to transcend the bounds of their
origins. And perhaps most beautifully, they reveal the brain’s desire and ability to try anyway—to
experiment with itself in novel ways and to use the material of its own thinking to try
to manufacturer new vehicles capable of doing so, of reaching into new realms of the unknown.