Knowledge as Information Compression, or Big Thing in the Chinese Room
Searle once posed the now-famous “Chinese room” thought experiment. In it, a non-Chinese speaker is equipped with a huge dictionary; one of every possible Chinese phrase and the appropriate corresponding response. With it, the non-speaker can communicate can communicate as fluidly as a native with someone outside the room (using slips of paper), despite not actually knowing Chinese. The idea here is that although the “black box” (as viewed from the outside) of the Chinese room seems to know Chinese, passing ever possible native-speaker test that you could think to administer. Yet it does not have any knowledge proper, at least in any definition of the word knowledge that we are used to. In fact, the intelligence of the non-Chinese speaker is not even used in the room; they only look up pages and copy down characters. So let's dispense with the middleman and replace them with a robot that looks up pages in the book and writes down characters. From this lens, the Chinese room clearly doe