La Rambla Tambla

John Searle is a nasty person, yes. But that doesn’t mean that the idea is bad.

So I have to begin here by acknowledging that the person who came up with the idea of the Chinese Room is… not good, to be kind. We can all acknowledge that. You don’t harass your students and make their lives miserable for your own sexual gratification. That’s bad, and I hope that we can all agree on that.

Okay.

Having said that, Searle is hardly the first person to think about this issue. He’s just the guy who came up with the title and concept that we use to discuss it. The idea here is one of how we can recognize cognition, humanity, and agentivity. I purposely use the word agentivity here because I don’t want to say personhood. The issue here is that personhood and ability to seem like a person are two different things- we’re not talking about a Turing test, but rather a test of group membership.

In this sense, we are perhaps closer to social engineering. Social engineering is usually linked to hacking and red teaming. It’s a strategy to allow individuals to gain entrance into a particular culture or social agglomeration with its own rules. For advisors, that’s pretty much what we do, albeit with societal approval and overall consent. We’re there, we are accepted as part of the group, and we can pretend to understand the qualia of being part of the group. But we are most definitely NOT part of the group (so I argue, but let’s let this play out and see if I’m wrong).

Even for those of us who have been trained in the discipline that we are supposed to advise (which I do not include myself in), we are not on the same path, or at least not the same ascribed path. We are outside of it by virtue of our work designation. We are not primarily working in the area that our advisees and coworkers are working in. Our advisees are hoping to gain access to a profession, and our coworkers are already working primarily in that profession, and are also relying on us to take care of the administrative responsibilities needed to ensure that our advisees can enter said profession. But again- WE are not part of that profession. We are not on that path. We guide others along the path, but we have never trod the path ourselves. We are, in a strange way, a perversion of Borges’ map- we are both part of the territory and a perversion of the territory ourselves. We force the question of representation- what is it that we are claiming to support, promote, and sustain? We have never been to the destination ourselves, and we likely never will. Yet here we are, supposedly guiding others to this destination in an authoritative, and in some cases determinative, manner.

What the hell? Where do we get off doing this? Why is it so necessary for us to do this? We are clearly part of the system, but how and why?

So this is where the Chinese Room comes in. Searle’s formulation is pretty simple to understand. Imagine a person sitting in a room with two airlocks, one for entry and one for exit. It’s like a cleanroom. You can receive something, and you can send something out. This person can receive messages from the input, and can send messages out through the output. The person gets a message through the input, looks at it, and sees that it is in Chinese. Now here’s the kicker- the person in the room does NOT speak Chinese. Can’t speak it, can’t read it, doesn’t understand it at all. However, the person in the room DOES have a rule book. This rule book has a (more or less) complete set of what possible inputs are in Chinese and what output should correspond to each input. This is such that even though the person in the room has no idea what they are looking at, they can match the input with the proper output. In point of fact, the person in the room may be exceedingly good at finding the correct output for each input based on their time receiving all manner of input, but in the end, the person in the room does NOT understand either the input or the output- they simply recognize patterns.

So think about it. You don’t speak the language- like receiving a message that says this: 혹시 언제 수영수업시간 인지 아시나요? (That’s Korean, not Chinese, since I don’t speak Chinese- make of that what you will!). You don’t know what this means. But you look in a book, and you match the characters to a proper response. This requires you to be able to recognize the patterns in the question, even if you don’t understand it. So you find the proper response, and you type it in: 수영수업은 3시에 시작합니다. Great!

So what the hell does this mean? Does it matter? The person in the room read the input, found the proper response, and provided the correct response. Everything is accurate. Do we care whether or not the person in the room actually understands the question or the answer? Isn’t it more important that the answer be correct?

There is no simple answer to this question. Think about how you use AI bots right now- do you care how they get the information they get? Or do you just care that the information is accurate? Where does authenticity figure in? Does authenticity even matter?

Let’s take that example from above. If you don’t speak Korean, you don’t know what the question or answer were. So who cares? But if you do understand, then you know they were the following: “Do you happen to know when the swim class time is?” “The swim class begins at 3 o’clock.” Great! Except… Korean is what is known as a high-context language, meaning that a huge amount of important information is not spoken. Instead, it is presumed to be understood. So that question and answer duo doesn’t really clarify anything unless we know what swim class we are talking about.

What happens if someone asks for further clarification? Just think about how you deal with it when you are looking at the business hours of a given business on Google. For most days, it’s fine, but what about holidays? What happens if Google says that hours may differ from standard hours? What do you do? Can Google fix this for you? I mean, they’re trying… But in reality, is this going to work?

This is where the problem comes in. Our frame of reference is a person working in a kiosk, or working a phone- let’s call them the respondent. We (let’s call ourselves questioners) expect (or perhaps hope) that the person in this role will be knowledgeable and able to answers questions, as well as be personable and kind in dealing with the general public. If you walk up to a person in a kiosk and ask “hey, when does the swim class start?” you can expect to have someone say “which class do you mean? What level? Where are you taking classes?” This does a double duty. It allows both the questioner and the respondent to be as specific as needed, negotiating an exchange of information and clarifying any misunderstandings. But it also serves to show that the respondent is authoritative and trustworthy. By asking the right clarifying questions, the respondent demonstrates their knowledge and group membership, establishing an identity as someone to be trusted because they are part of the overall institutional world, linked to the structures we seek to access or understand.

But this is where the model falls apart. Someone working at a kiosk in a complex organization might well have the opportunity to move around, take on different roles, and eventually ascend into a role that actually performs the activities which they are currently just providing information about. In fact, the kiosk duty might just be temporary while they are away from their real responsibility, which is performing the activities themselves. Taking the example from before, a swimming instructor might just be taking on a few extra hours working the information desk between shifts teaching swimming lessons. Someone working the page desk at NBC could well move on to being closely associated with on-air talent, or even become that talent themselves. Hell, look at Aubrey Plaza, Jack McBrayer, or Sona Movsesian, for a short list of examples.

But an academic advisor will never become a professor in the department that they advise in. Not without a complete redirection of their life choices. Advisors are frequently required to have master’s degrees in student affairs, a field which has established its own identity, theories, and research priorities. This means that advisors have already devoted significant time and effort to learning the craft of advising as its own profession independent from disciplines. To go back and learn the discipline they advise on would require expending the same amount of effort yet again, and then likely more in order to qualify for a Ph.D. This would take time that they (WE) simply do not have. The opportunity cost of doing this at the time of life that it would transpire is massive enough that only an independently wealthy or fantastically lucky individual could do so.

This makes the professional academic advisor a perpetual outsider. An integral part of the system, performing vital tasks, sometimes the difference between success and failure, but never actually a full member of the society they support. Present at staff meetings, but never faculty meetings, unless given special dispensation, and even then, relegated to special topics which will often be cut due to time. A figure in the background, guiding all the students towards their goals, interacting with professors only when something is problematic, and tasked with performing essential actions which they neither fully understand nor are needed to, all while being perceived as having all pertinent knowledge of complex situations outside their full understanding.

I would argue that we are the closest approximation of what a Chinese Room looks like in reality, not a simple thought experiment. This is possibly the greatest fault of the metaphor- it is decontextualized, left barren on some strange tabula rasa which all can access and none can actually comprehend. In reality, a Chinese Room must exist in a given situation, bound by rules, culture, and history. It cannot be sterile by the very nature of the metaphor- it must be linked and mixed with outside entities.

And there we live and work, alongside those who are actually doing the work and living the life, those who actually inhabit the qualia that make the path real. We live alongside it, sometimes even serving to define it, but we are not part of it. We guide, we define, we counsel, but we are not inside the borders of the map. We do not exit our room- we stay inside. But we are very aware of the fact that we are in the room. We know that the room is a room based on its boundaries- the room itself is defined by its walls, its barriers. And indeed, our job is to work with these barriers. Our work is defined by them. We work with them, trying to establish them or redefine them with institutional support.

What is most important to remember here is that we operate in the field of the barriers and relations. We create limits and boundaries, as well as pathways. But we do NOT participate in the field itself- we are, at every level, NOT present in the field. We are always ancillary. And yet, we are essential. We are a key and vital portion of the culture. This is, of course, the realistic double bind of the Chinese Room. We are clearly intimate and essential, but at the same time external and seen as non-essential.