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I'm not sure. Say the person has translations tables for english and chinese. If the second tester asked in English "what did you talk about with the last perso

• burkaman 5y ago
  That depends on the premise of this new thought experiment. Are the program-books allowed to include side effects of writing down records of interactions, and take those records as input? If not, it's not a fair comparison with a computer. If so, then yes I think the room could be able to answer. Why did I have to add something, if the room already understood Chinese before? Because we're essentially adding a second program now and trying to share understanding between them. The room did understand Chinese, but that understanding will not be accessible to a new component unless we design with that in mind. An analogy would be asking a person "which muscles did you use to digest that food?" Clearly some part of the human-system knows this, because it activated the right muscles and successfully digested the food, but the part of the system that hears and responds to English doesn't have access to that knowledge. We would need to redesign the system and programs in order to share understanding between these different parts of the system. I realize we were using the term "hash-table" in this thread and what I'm talking about wouldn't be possible with just tables, but such a simple program is not a requirement for the thought experiment. The idea is we just have some black box function that takes inputs and produces outputs and we don't know how it works.