The Chinese Room
Searle · Minds, Brains, and Programs · 1980
You are locked in a room. Through a slot, sheets covered in Chinese symbols are passed to you, symbols you do not understand in the slightest. But you have a thick rulebook, written in your own language, that tells you: "to this mark, reply with that one." You follow the rules, you pass sheets back, and outside a Chinese reader finds your answers flawless: to them, the room understands Chinese. You, though, have understood nothing. A machine that handles our words, a chatbot that answers so well, is it doing anything other than what you do in that room?
Is running a program, however flawless, enough to understand, or does handling symbols by their form alone stay blind to their meaning?