66 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? The exchange of notes goes on for a few days and the two seem to be getting on well. There is even a little romance in the air. When the week is over I open the door and the two meet. The graduate student says, “Hello. It’s nice to finally meet you in person.’ The man is puzzled because, of course, she has spoken to him in Chinese. He knows no Chinese. “Tm terribly sorry, but I don’t speak Chinese,” he says. She is puzzled, “But I spoke with you this last week!” “No, I really don't speak it,” he says. And, of course, he is telling the truth. The book he has been using contains the rules for answering questions in Chinese, but he has absolutely no knowledge of the language. I'll leave to your imagination whether the two strike up a real relationship and live happily ever after. This is the Story of the Chinese Room. The setup is able to fool someone into believing there is a Chinese speaking person in the room, yet there is not. Where does the understanding of Chinese lie? The man definitely does not understand Chinese. And the book clearly does not understand Chinese because it is an inanimate object. Yet the person outside the room is convinced she is communicating with a Chinese speaker. The analogy to a computer is clear. The book is software and the man blindly following instructions is the hardware. John Searle, who devised the thought experiment uses it to show computers can never understand because there is no place in a mechanistic system for understanding to exist. The Chinese Room has sparked huge argument in philosophical circles; let me boil it down to its simplest form. First, let's refute Searle's position with the ‘System Argument. The man plus the book form a system. Systems understand; their individual components do not. My blood does not understand. My brain without blood would not understand — it would be dead! Plug my brain into a good supply of blood; add a dash of glucose, and it will understand the mos