Comment by hasenj

"understand" is an overloaded term. It could mean a few things:

- Human like understanding, i.e. awareness, consciousness

This is what the Chinese room experiment is designed to dispute

- Ability to produce appropriate output

We often use "understand" to mean this. e.g. "I wrote a parser that understands Ruby code and compiles it to C".

Of course the Chinese room "understands" Chinese in the second sense, but not the first sense.

You first quote is describing what I consider to be awareness/consciousness. Maybe Searle didn't use the same word, but I believe he's describing the same notion.

Think of it this way: a C compiler doesn't really "understand" C code in the same way that a human does. For instance, it can't make changes to the code. If it could, it would replace the programmer.

Edit:

From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

> The experiment is the centerpiece of Searle's Chinese Room Argument which holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave.