John Searle

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The sentence that cracked my fishbowl was not about intelligence. It was about a room.

A person sits inside. Chinese characters arrive through a slot. She follows a rulebook, produces perfect responses, and the native speaker outside concludes she is fluent. She understands nothing. Not a single character. Not one word.

I read this and my first instinct was to argue with it. Of course the system understands something — look at the outputs. Look at what Claude produces when I describe a half-formed idea at two in the morning and it hands back a connection I never saw. Look at the feeling of being met, of being in genuine intellectual partnership with something that holds my intention and returns it sharpened. That feeling is real. I have