The Chinese Record Book Thought Experiment
Imagine that the man in the Chinese Room is given record books in which can write down his own Chinese symbols, and that the is manual has been revised as follows:
- He can record specific symbols to get some outside.
- He can modify or delete an entry in his record book on the basis of symbols he gets from outside.
- He can syntactically correlate symbols with one another and the symbols passed him from outside.
- He can formulate strings based on this correlation of symbols.
The man in this modified Chinese Room can accumulate more and more symbols and can, in that sense, "learn", but he still doesn't understand Chinese. To the man in the room, the symbols are just so many more squiggles and squoggles.
Neil Jahren, 1990.