Re:The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generat...
by ben_w on Monday July 27, 2026 @05:01AM
(#49066884)
My point here is that regardless of how you view the entire system of [human + room + books], the human themselves in that system are still just a cog. The human themselves doesn't know Chinese, they are literally writing down Chinese without understanding it, by design of the thought experiment.
"Is the Chinese Room intelligent/conscious?" is a scissor question*, i.e. people strongly disagree about what it shows.
Myself, I'm with you: the system collectively is intelligent, despite the human in the loop being reduced to a cog in that system. The biological analogy to "the human does not understand Chinese therefore the system is not conscious" would be "no individual cell in a human body knows what the human is doing therefore humans are not conscious".
Wait, did I miss the Chinese Room suddenly becoming sensible, or relevant? Last I checked it was a failure to accept that the system of "human + room" can in fact understand Chinese, even if the components individually don't.