welcome to the chinese room.

I learned about this semi-philosophical, and somewhat visually ridiculous1 thought experiment in a Stanford Minds and Machines class, where, for weeks, we listened to each other’s often tired thoughts on what a mind is, what machines are, and whether the latter really can obtain this abstract, human condition.

The basis of “The Chinese Room” is the Turing Test, where, a machine is said to pass when a human can’t tell the difference between it and another human being.

In 1980, John Searle came up with the “Chinese Room” to disprove the equating of a Turing test pass with possession of a mind. A machine that “speaks” Chinese, he argues, doesn’t mean it understands it.

In his imaginary room, a man sits inside with a detailed handbook to translate Chinese into English, and can (with speed and tirelessness) process the input and successfully create corresponding outputs. But does the man really understand Chinese? No, he’s simply following a set of rules.

So is the argument with LLMs and AI, since last I checked on the discourse. But this Substack isn’t an AI Substack.

I chose this name because it sounded funny. I think of myself, a Chinese person in a room.

Only after I chose it, did I realize that the thought experiment does relate to problems I always think about: language, technology, culture. Thus this Newsletter came about.

about me

I'm a writer. I process everything (my crashouts, existential crises, literature and film) as my fingers move across on the keyboard. I even got writer certified (English B.A. and M.A. at Stanford). I just love the English language.

My native language is Chinese. I spent the first 15 years of my life in Xi’an, China, listening to Harry Potter audiobooks (50+ times, each), writing stories (Harry Potter fanfiction), failing my history and politics class.

I love film journalism. An ex-journalist at the Stanford Daily, I wrote about my favorite genre, horror, as a medium for expressing the lived realities of marginalized peoples.

I have an exceptionally bad memory and received two Stanford grants to write about a novel about it. Its “official” blurb is problematizing the relationship between memory and national and personal identity formation.

I write short stories, most of the published ones I look back upon with disgust and hatred. I used to run a blog, which, I’m grateful is buried in the continuous pile of content and words generated on the internet every minute.

I used to be obsessed with the em dash, but now I prefer overusing parentheses (it sounds less dramatic, like whispering gossip to your friends).

My favorite social media platforms are Goodreads, Letterboxd, and Twitter on good days.