Can AI Understand? The Chinese Room Argument Says No, But Is It Right?

Forbes

23-04-2025

Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days. AI and the tools that enable it, including machine learning and neural networks, have, of course, been the subject of intensive research and engineering progress going back decades, dating back to the 1950s and early 60s. Many of the foundational concepts and mathematics are much older. But throughout its history, up to the present state-of-the-art large language models, the question remains: Are these systems genuinely intelligent, or are they merely sophisticated simulations? In other words, do they understand? At the heart of this debate lies a famous philosophical thought experiment — the Chinese room argument — proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980.
The Chinese room argument challenges the claim that AI can genuinely understand language, let alone possess true consciousness. The thought experiment goes like this: A person who knows no Chinese sits inside a sealed room. Outside, a native Chinese speaker passes notes written in Chinese through a slot to the person inside. Inside the room, the person follows detailed instructions from a manual, written in English, that tells them exactly how to respond to these notes using a series of symbols. As they receive input characters in Chinese, the manual tells the person, in English, what output characters in Chinese and in what sequence they should pass back out the slot. By mechanically and diligently following the instructions, the person inside the room returns appropriate replies to the Chinese speaker outside the room.
From the perspective of the Chinese speaker outside, the room seems perfectly capable of understanding and communicating in Chinese. To them, the room is a black box; they have no knowledge about what is happening inside. Yet, at the core of Searle's argument, neither the person inside nor the room itself actually understands the Chinese language. They are simply systematically manipulating symbols based on the rules in the instruction manual. The essence of the argument is that understanding requires something beyond the mere manipulation of symbols and syntax. It requires semantics — meaning and intentionality. AI systems, no matter how sophisticated, Searle argues, are fundamentally similar to the person inside the Chinese room. And therefore cannot have true understanding, no matter how sophisticated they may get.
Searle's argument did not emerge in isolation. Questions about whether AI actually learns and understands are not new; it has been fiercely debated for decades, deeply rooted in philosophical discussions about the nature of learning and intelligence. The philosophical foundations of questioning machine intelligence date back much further than 1980 when Searle published his now famous paper. Most notably to Alan Turing's seminal paper in 1950 where he proposed the 'Turing Test'. In Turing's scenario, a computer is considered intelligent if it can hold a conversation indistinguishable from that of a human. In other words, if the human interacting with the computer cannot tell if it is another human or a machine.
While Turing focused on practical interactions and outcomes between the human and the computer, Searle asked a deeper philosophical question: Even if a computer passes the Turing Test, does it have or lack genuine understanding? Can it ever?
Well before Searle and Turing, philosophers including René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz had grappled with the nature of consciousness and mechanical reasoning. Leibniz famously imagined a giant mill as a metaphor for the brain, arguing that entering it would reveal nothing but mechanical parts, never consciousness or understanding. Somehow, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Searle's Chinese room argument extends these ideas explicitly to computers, emphasizing the limits of purely mechanical systems.
Since its introduction, the Chinese room argument has sparked significant debate and numerous counter arguments. Responses generally fall into a few different key categories. One group of related responses, referred to as the 'systems reply', argues that although the individual in the room might not understand Chinese, the system as a whole — including the manual, the person, and the room — does. Understanding, in this view, emerges from the entire system rather than from any single component. The focus on the person inside the room, for these counter arguments, is misguided. Searle argued against this by suggesting that the person could theoretically memorize the entire manual, in essence not requiring the room or the manual and becoming the whole system themselves, and still not understand Chinese —adding that understanding requires more than following rules and instructions.
Another group of counter arguments, the 'robot reply', suggest that it is necessar to embed the computer within a physical robot that interacts with the world, allowing sensory inputs and outputs. These counter arguments propose that real understanding requires interaction with the physical world, something Searle's isolated room lacks. But similarly, Searle countered that adding sensors to an embodied robot does not solve the fundamental problem — the system, in this case including the robot, would still be following instructions it did not understand.
Counter arguments that fall into the 'brain simulator reply' category propose that if an AI could precisely simulate every neuron in a human brain, it would necessarily replicate the brain's cognitive processes and, by extension, its understanding. Searle replied that even perfect simulation of brain activity does not necessarily create actual understanding, exposing a deep fundamental question in the debate: What exactly is understanding, even in our own brains and minds?
The common thread in Searle's objections is that the fundamental limitation his thought experiment proposes remains unaddressed by these counter arguments: the manipulation of symbols alone, i.e. syntax, no matter how complex or seemingly intelligent, does not imply comprehension or understanding, i.e. semantics.
To me, there is an even more fundamental limitation to Searle's argument: For any formally mechanical syntactic system that manipulates symbols, in the absence of any understanding, there is no way for the person in the room to be able to make decisions about which symbols to send back out. In the use of real language, there is an increasingly large space of parallel and equal branching syntactic, i.e. symbol, decisions that can occur that can only be resolved and decided by semantic understanding.
Admittedly, the person in the room does not know Chinese. But this is by the very narrow construction of the thought experiment in the first place. As a result, Searle's argument is not 'powerful' enough — is logically insufficient —to conclude that some future AI will not be able to understand and think, because any true understanding AI must necessarily exceed the constraints of the thought experiment. Any decisions about syntax, i.e. what symbols are chosen and in what order they are placed, must necessarily be dependent on an understanding of the semantics, i.e. context and meaning, of the incoming message in order to reply back in a meaningful way. In other words, the number of equally possible parallel syntactic choices are really large, and can only be disambiguated by some form of semantic understanding. Syntactic decisions are not linear and sequential. They are parallel and branching. In any real conversation, the Chinese speaker on the outside would not be fooled.
So do machines 'understand'? Maybe, maybe not, and maybe they never will. But if an AI can interact using language by responding in ways that clearly demonstrate branching syntactic decisions that are increasingly complex, meaningful, and relevant to the human (or other agent) it is interacting with, eventually it will cross a threshold that invalidates Searle's argument.
The Chinese room argument matters given the increasing language capabilities of today's large language models and other advancing forms of AI. Do these systems genuinely understand language? Are they actually reasoning? Or are they just sophisticated versions of Searle's Chinese room?
Current AI systems rely on performing huge statistical computations that predict the next word in a sentence based on learned probabilities, without any genuine internal experience or comprehension. Most experts agree that, as impressive as they are, they are fundamentally similar to Searle's Chinese room. But will this remain so? Or will a threshold be crossed from today's systems that perform sophisticated but 'mindless' statistical pattern matching to systems that truly understand and reason in the sense that they have an internal representation, meaning, and experience of their knowledge and the manipulation of that knowledge?
The ultimate question may be if they do cross such a threshold would we even know it or recognize it? We as humans do not fully understand our own minds. Part of the challenge in understanding our own conscious experience is precisely that it is an internal self-referential experience. So how will we go about testing or recognizing it in an intelligence that is physically different and operates using different algorithms than our own? Right or wrong, Searle's argument — and all the thinking it has inspired —has never been more relevant.