Block's Reply

Block resurrects the Systems Reply to point out that Searle-in-the-room is an English-understanding system which does not itself understand Chinese but which nevertheless implements a Chinese-understanding system.

To help understand Block's point, here is a reconstructed dialogue between Block and Searle using their own words.

Block, “The Mind as the Software of the Brain”:

The systems reply has a positive and a negative component. The negative component is that we cannot reason from "Bill has never sold uranium to North Korea" to "Bill's company has never sold uranium to North Korea". Similarly, we cannot reason from "Bill does not understand Chinese" to "The system of which Bill is a part does not understand Chinese. (See Copeland, 1993b.) There is a gap in Searle's argument. The positive component goes further, saying that the whole system--man + program + board + paper + input and output doors--does understand Chinese, even though the man who is acting as the CPU does not. If you open up your own computer, looking for the CPU, you will find that it is just one of the many chips and other components on the main circuit-board. The systems reply reminds us that the CPUs of the thinking computers we hope to have someday will not themselves think--rather, they will be parts of thinking systems.

The effect of Searle's internalization move--the "new" Chinese Room--is to attempt to destroy the analogy between looking inside the computer and looking inside the Chinese Room. If one looks inside the computer, one sees many chips in addition to the CPU. But if one looks inside the "new" Chinese Room, all one sees is you, since you have memorized the library and internalized the functions of the scratchpad and the blackboard. But the point to keep in mind is that although the non-CPU components are no longer easy to see, they are not gone. Rather, they are internalized. If the program requires the contents of one register to be placed in another register, and if you would have done this in the original Chinese Room by copying from one piece of scratch paper to another, in the new Chinese Room you must copy from one of your mental analogs of a piece of scratch paper to another. You are implementing the system by doing what the CPU would do and you are simultaneously simulating the non-CPU components. So if the positive side of the systems reply is correct, the total system that you are implementing does understand Chinese.

Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs”:

So there are really two subsystems in the man; one understands English, the other Chinese, and "it’s just that the two systems have little to do with each other." But, I want to reply, not only do they have little to do with each other, they are not even remotely alike. The subsystem that understands English (assuming we allow ourselves to talk in this jargon of "subsystems" for a moment) knows that the stories are about restaurants and eating hamburgers, he knows that he is being asked questions about restaurants and that he is answering questions as best he can by making various inferences from the content of the story, and so on. But the Chinese system knows none of this. Whereas the English subsystem knows that "hamburgers" refers to hamburgers, the Chinese subsystem knows only that "squiggle squiggle" is followed by "squoggle squoggle." All he knows is that various formal symbols are being introduced at one end and manipulated according to rules written in English, and other symbols are going out at the other end. The whole point of the original example was to argue that such symbol manipulation by itself couldn’t be sufficient for understanding Chinese in any literal sense because the man could write "squoggle squoggle" after "squiggle squiggle" without understanding anything in Chinese. And it doesn't meet that argument to postulate subsystems within the man, because the subsystems are no better off than the man was in the first place; they still don't have anything even remotely like what the English-speaking man (or subsystem) has. Indeed, in the case as described, the Chinese subsystem is simply a part of the English subsystem, a part that engages in meaningless symbol manipulation according to rules in English.

Block, “The Mind as the Software of the Brain”:

The systems reply rejoinder is that you implement a Chinese understanding system without yourself understanding Chinese or necessarily even being aware of what you are doing under that description. The systems reply sees the Chinese Room (new and old) as an English system implementing a Chinese system. What you are aware of are the thoughts of the English system, for example your following instructions and consulting your internal library. But in virtue of doing this Herculean task, you are also implementing a real intelligent Chinese-speaking system, and so your body houses two genuinely distinct intelligent systems. The Chinese system also thinks, but though you implement this thought, you are not aware of it.

The systems reply can be backed up with an addition to the thought experiment that highlights the division of labor. Imagine that you take on the Chinese simulating as a 9-5 job. You come in Monday morning after a weekend of relaxation, and you are paid to follow the program until 5 PM. When you are working, you concentrate hard at working, and so instead of trying to figure out the meaning of what is said to you, you focus your energies on working out what the program tells you to do in response to each input. As a result, during working hours, you respond to everything just as the program dictates, except for occasional glances at your watch. (The glances at your watch fall under the same category as the noises and heat given off by computers: aspects of their behavior that is not part of the machine description but are due rather to features of the implementation.) If someone speaks to you in English, you say what the program (which, you recall, describes a real Chinese speaker) dictates. So if during working hours someone speaks to you in English, you respond with a request in Chinese to speak Chinese, or even an inexpertly pronounced "No speak English," that was once memorized by the Chinese speaker being simulated, and which you the English speaking system may even fail to recognize as English. Then, come 5 PM, you stop working, and react to Chinese talk the way any monolingual English speaker would.

Thus, you and the Chinese system cohabit one body. In effect, Searle uses the fact that you are not aware of the Chinese system's thoughts as an argument that it has no thoughts. But this is an invalid argument. Real cases of multiple personalities are often cases in which one personality is unaware of the others.