Understanding 67 A key problem posed by Searle's Chinese Room is whether you can know everything about a situation from just looking at the inputs and outputs. This is very similar to the restriction posed by the Turing Test. In that case if we were to trace the wire from our computer terminal to the other room we would either find a human typing messages or a large box covered in flashing lights. This would definitively answer the question whether we were talking to a man or a machine. Similarly, if we opened the door to the Chinese Room we would immediately know whether there was a real Chinese speaker in there or not. But opening the door on both tests misses the point. The question asks, “if the inputs and outputs are the same does it matter what is really going on inside a closed system?” Black Boxes Experiments involving closed systems are known as Black Box experiments. They presume you can learn everything about the inner workings of a box simply by probing it from the outside. Young electronic engineers are often given black boxes as a test. Electronic components hidden in the box are connected to three external terminals on the outside. The student is asked to deduce what is in the box using only an electric meter to probe those terminals. Here are a few examples of the possible contents of a black box. They would all show up identically on the student’s meter. Although internally different they are externally identical. Even my ‘silly fourth choice with a cat in the box does not give ony ” i , 85 50 1 ae 34 34 (es : 85 85 Black Box Equivalence HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015757