5 ms·

But the room as a whole WOULD understand chinese. The person in the story is the mouth, not the brain, the look up book/device is the brain.

• rvense 6y ago
  If such a device could exist, it would be the part which understood. If the questions were about facts and the person looked up the facts in a book, it wouldn't be the room as a whole that knew the facts. The room as a whole delivers facts, but there's a fairly obvious separation of responsibilities in the implementation...
  • ivalm 6y ago
    > The room as a whole delivers facts, but there's a fairly obvious separation of responsibilities in the implementation... Sure, but I think that's always the case. When you speak your entire body (at least head/neck/chest, but also cardiovascular system) are involved in "delivering" information but your tongue (and for that matter most organs involved) doesn't "know" the information. We still say that "you" as a person know something. When a computer displays a result of some (cpu) calculation on the monitor, the gpu making electrical signals for the input of the monitor has no meaningful knowledge about the calculation, etc, but we still say "the computer" made the calculation.