[tshaddox]

Then what is the point in asking if a machine “understands” English and Chinese? It sounds like the question would be either completely untestable, or the answer would just be “no” by definition because we’re defining “understanding” to be “based on human mental activity.” It just doesn’t seem like a useful question if the answer can not be determined by a test such as the Chinese room thought experiment.

[goatlover]

Well, if we asked this about Data from Star Trek, then the answer would have to be yes, or mostly yes (Data does struggle to make sense of some human behavior on the show). So then the question is what gives Data an understanding that the Chinese Room lacks?

Data participates in human society and he has a human-like body. Data also has subjective experiences, as evidence by his dream sequences in one episode. Whereas the Chinese Room is just following a bunch of rules for translation. But Data doesn't merely translate from one set of symbols to another given a large set of rules. He learns by interacting with people and his experiences as an android. From that we could say understanding is the result of an embodied social activity that the Chinese Room completely lacks. Whatever the Chinese room is said to be doing, that's not the same as understanding language.

Another way to put it is that language isn't equivalent to symbol manipulation, even though it makes use of symbols, or a least since the written word was invented.

[_xnmw]

The point of asking such a question is to prove whether or not computational processes accurately model the human brain.

Unfortunately this is a recursive question, because the only device we have for exploring the difference between a brain and a computer is our brains. Thus, I believe the Chinese room experiment is rightly composed of as a thought experiment - what other means do we have for assessing our difference from computers other than our intuition?