How Is it That We Understand?

One major controversy in the philosophy of mind is driven by the claim that computers can think, or will soon be able to. If that claim is true then it makes it a lot easier to assume that the brain is a kind of computer and that what we call mind is simply a word we use to describe the way the brain functions.

Or put another way, mind is to brain what computer software is to the computer's hardware. This view is called "functionalism."

In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to our cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and neuroscientist Michael Egnor has a helpful discussion of it at Evolution News and Views. Egnor describes the argument as follows:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You've moved to China and you get a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth with you is a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to the algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to and from the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing. As Egnor says: "Thought is about understanding the process, not merely about mechanically carrying out the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm."

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and do understand, either our brains are not computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

This leads to the question of how a material chunk of meat, the brain, can generate something as mysterious as understanding. If all the material that makes up a brain were placed in a laboratory flask would the flask understand? Would it be conscious?

That human beings are capable of such marvels is evidence that there's more to our cognitive abilities than our material brain. Perhaps that something more is an immaterial mind or soul that's cognitively integrated with the material brain and which the brain cannot function without.