[A4A] The Chinese Room: Gloryhole
There's a philosophical thought experiment called The Chinese Room. It divides opinions on the meaning of intelligence, understanding, and consciousness. It goes something like the following.
Suppose there's a room with a gap under the door. No matter what you do, nobody will come out of the room or answer the door. If you listen closely, you can hear fans, pumps, and mechanical noises inside...maybe some breathing and mumbling, but you can't be sure. The most notable thing about this room, however, is that any message written in Chinese can be slid under the door, and after a brief wait, a reply is returned in perfect Chinese. There could be a person who understands how to read and write Chinese inside the room. Or perhaps there's a computer system that automatically scans each page fed under the door, composes a reply using artificial intelligence, and prints out the result. But maybe there's a person who doesn't know a single thing about the Chinese language, who is consulting shelves full of books that provide a step-by-step algorithm for replying to any message written in Chinese, finding the first character on the spine of a book, writing down numbers, performing calculations, and selecting symbols that they don't understand from vast tables. But which of these mechanisms, if any, actually replies to the messages, is unknown. The room is a black box, so to speak.
Lacking any further information...does the room understand Chinese?
Suppose that same room also has a hole in the door at crotch level. By a similarly mysterious mechanism, it gives you sexual pleasure. Are you going to try to figure out what's going on inside the room, or just use it to get off?