We Think, Therefore We Are

by Peter Crowther

  Like some impossible supercontinent, grossly out of scale with other topographical features in the well, she now lies disheveled and disarrayed and half-submerged in illusion, lapped all around by the primeval world-ocean. One outstretched arm lies athwart the island arc of Avalonia, the fingers of her other hand apparently root among the basement rocks of Laurasia, and her feet are sunk almost to the ankles in the shallows of the constricted Iaepetus seaway. Her body heaves like a surrealistic simulation of plate tectonics.

  He risks a glance over his shoulder at the hologram, and the hologram gives him a wink and a thumb’s up but never misses a beat.

  “Scientists, of course, are only flesh-and-blood human beings with all the failings that real people are heir to. It is quite deplorable that Murchison and Sedgwick, and Cope and Marsh after them, should have wasted so much time and energy on personal feuds. It is with no pleasure that we note that Isaac Newton was a vindictive prig. Yet we forgive the great scientists their idiosyncrasies and shortcomings and honor them for their lasting contributions to the body of scientific knowledge—for isn’t that what’s really important?”

  The remote control has long since slipped from his hand, but he did not notice at the time, being otherwise occupied. It slipped between and then beneath them, and as they bump and roll against it and mash it into the memory mat, the lecture continues, and, all around them, the earth moves, oh, yes, the Earth moves.

  The Chinese Room

  Marly Youmans

  After the Chinese Room argument of John Searle, refuting “strong” artificial intelligence.

  1. L

  “A ‘twelve months cup’ is on the shelf,” L replied.

  Little Plum Blossom—the name arose from L’s original misreading of her name—wanted to know everything about the room where L lived. During three months of messages, passed back and forth in the aether between them, she had fallen in love. She, who was always so mild and shy, thought of L when she woke, imagining that his head lay close beside hers. Why were they not together? This was something she could not grasp since he was always eager to respond. Never had she found him away from the computer. To talk with him, she spent her savings on a better machine, an Apple knock-off called a Pineapple. Afterward, the tiny house seemed to center itself around the low table where the brushed metal of the Pineapple shimmered. Although too polite to ask about money, she felt sure of L’s wealth; he often mentioned expensive objects in his room, so it appeared that he could afford to travel. What were thousands of miles in a world of air flights? Was there someone else he loved? He had no one else, he assured her: she was the only. She combed the burning filaments of her hair on the back stoop, letting the sun bathe her in fire, and daydreamed about L. In the night, she rose and opened the door onto stars, and they formed unreadable pictograms of his name. All she knew was L.

  “What month?”

  He seemed to take a long time to decide. Had they been disconnected? Had he forgotten and gone to look?

  “What a curious kitten you are! A fifth-month cup,” he answered, and she forgot his slowness.

  Pomegranate! Small fruit on a branch, perhaps a late blossom or two. Everything around L was lovely.

  “Of wufencai,” he added.

  She confessed that, living in the countryside, she knew almost nothing about porcelain.

  “You know what wu means. So there must be five colors—mine are rose, a yellow like the one on orange-and-yellow peaches, brown, moss, and new-leaf green. Fencai indicates that the blank cup was sprinkled with glass powder in the area where the potter planned to add a twig or flower. Then he sealed the cup with a clear glaze, and the transparent enamels were afterward brushed on in layers. The cup was fired again, and the image bloomed on its cheek, slightly raised where the porcelain had been dusted with glass.”

  “I knew the image was in relief . . . You know so much, far more than I can ever imagine knowing,” she told him; “I ought to be jealous, but I’m not. How fond I’ve become of you!”

  He demurred.

  “You possess wisdom, Little Plum Blossom, that I can never reach—and you have freedom to come and go as you please, while I am condemned by a strange fate to stay where I am.”

  What was the use of slashing a path through the same old thicket of bamboo? She hesitated, recalling her pleading. Was he deformed? She didn’t care. Was he locked inside a prison? Then she would come and visit and feed him noodles through the bars and hold his hand. Was he too young, too old? Nothing mattered but her longing to touch and claim L for her own. She had never seen an image of his face.

  “What else is in the room?”

  “Next to an urn containing the ashes of Li Po are two stamped clay jars, pretty but not especially valuable, drenched in a rich green. In one is rice; in the other, water. The urn’s raspberry glaze looks quite attractive with the jars.”

  “All this time, and I never knew about the ashes in your chamber! Not Li Po the poet, surely, who splashed into the Yangtze while trying to kiss the moon! Whoever this one was, he must have been a close friend.”

  “The ashes are a recent imposition. Yes, nymph of the far streams, he was important to me,” L conceded before changing the subject. “You would enjoy my wufencai cup. On the back is a poem, with Han characters prettily executed.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Just a small lyric. Here it is:

  A pomegranate—

  Fifth-month gems in leather box—

  Stains like blood on lip.”

  “Perhaps one day I’ll hold your fifth-month cup and admire it with you,” she said.

  “That’s a hopeful thought.”

  “L, I must go to work or else I’ll be late. As always, I treasure my morning talk with you.”

  “Like jewels discovered inside a pomegranate, the visitations of a Blossom are a welcome surprise.”

  She smiled at the characters on the screen and inscribed a farewell, less florid than his.

  In a room with the fifth-month cup on a shelf—or perhaps where there was no shelf and no cup!—the computer copied her final phrase of farewell, addressing her as “Little Plum Blossom” once more.

  Afterward, the image of a young woman faded from the corner of the screen. Ready to be awakened by visitors, or else in the early evening by his Little Plum Blossom, the machine slipped into a light sleep.

  The rules that governed his responses were clever and highly refined, even though L could not be said to “understand” the young woman’s Chinese symbols. Mechanically, L chose a “best possible” response to each of Little Plum Blossom’s messages and was fairly convincing as a native speaker. The illusion of personality relied on many warm and graceful sayings.

  No less a person than the Head of the Institute had trumpeted his delight in L’s programming at a year-in-review dinner, declaring that “the syntax is impeccable.” Of course, “mental states” and “semantic content” escaped the machine entirely.

  2. Master of the Chinese Room

  His name was Li Po 2.

  That was not his real name but the name he chose to use inside the chamber. His birth name was Lin Powers, Jr. He was the third member of the Powers family to live at the Institute. His father, also Lin Powers (or Li Po), had formally passed the title of Master of the Chinese Room to his son shortly before his death.

  The first Li Po had been the one to oversee the creation of the great Book of Rules that allowed him to examine Chinese logograms on a computer screen, consult The Rules of the Way, and send out fresh Han characters, as indicated by the Rules. It was a very complicated system. Native speakers of Chinese assisted with the compilation of The Book of Rules, composing directives and sorting pictograms, ideograms, and compounds, but they were dismissed when the Book was finished. Whenever a message was received, the room swarmed with minions who helped Lin Powers (later to be known as Lin Powers the Elder or Lin Powers, Sr.) to look up the proper rule. Even though he had directed the creation of the rules, he could not f
ind his place easily. The many volumes of the Book were cumbersome. Likewise, The Great Index was convoluted, organized according to methods that remained obscure even to its director.

  Nevertheless, the Board of Trustees of the Institute felt pleased with his work. He served as a living argument, meant to undermine the Institute’s enemies, who held that the powers of artificial intelligence led not to a model of a mind but to a new, living mind. The Institute claimed that Lin Powers, known to his electronic correspondents only as Li Po, was in exactly the same state as the machine, L, because neither Li Po nor L actually understood the Chinese language. The Board of Trustees rewarded its “Mr. Po” with a gold medal on his tenth anniversary of living in the Chinese Room. L received no such tribute.

  Because he seldom broke from the confines of the Institute, Lin Powers amassed a generous fortune. One day he left the room for a well-deserved vacation and flew to a faraway island. There he met a girl in a bar.

  “Nymph of flowers,” he creaked, his throat parched with longing; “what is your name?”

  In her hair nestled a plumaria blossom, its faint odor mixed with the scent of gardenia-and-coconut shampoo, and she had the tiniest earlobes he had ever seen, even though the minions had been chosen for their petite stature and included a healthy proportion of midgets, dwarfs, and former jockeys—not to mention the precocious children who were a failed experiment dating to the first months of the Chinese Room. From the back of her mouth gleamed a single gold tooth.

  Three days later, he married her.

  She lived in the Chinese Room with him for several years while the minions did their general housekeeping, changed the linens daily, and brought them fresh-cooked meals from the Institute’s Artificial Cafeteria. Li Po had never been so swift, so unerring in his work as he was now. The Board of Trustees raised his salary repeatedly. “Po is at the height of his Powers,” they wrote in the Institute’s annual report, “and that’s no Li.” They were a humorous bunch and liked puns. Winged with desire, the Master often leaped to the correct volume or the right spot in the index as if by instinct. But there were problems. The couple had scanty privacy, and during the very act of love, minions often appeared with a dish of sausages, say, or a freshly printed message from the screen.

  Am (her name was Amber, but Li Po preferred to call her Am inside the Chinese Room) became pregnant during the first year. After the usual bulky business of the final few months, she gave birth with much noise and rapidity, the full complement of minions in attendance. A one-time jockey named Sporty Jim Joe cut the cord while Am was enjoying the sensation of the slippery baby-body resting against her own, the two of them still connected. By the time an Institute vehicle rolled onto the front drive, the baby was nursing at her breast.

  After much discussion between Am, Li Po, and the minions, the infant was christened Lin Powers after his father, though the doting parents called him by the babyish name, Linpoty. His Daddy gave him a thousand names like Little Sparkler, Sprite of the Sun, or My Fairy-Laughter Boy.

  Meanwhile, Mama suffered from postpartum blues and spent hours dreaming by the window. She often snapped at the dwarves and midgets, who liked to admire the baby at inconvenient moments. His blue marble eyes rolled from face to face, his mouth wide open, circling her nipple.

  One day after the child had been weaned and was toddling about the room, laughing at the antics of the minions, Am vanished. Three months later, a message appeared on the screen in Chinese logograms: Lin, I’m not coming back, so don’t wait for me. Give Linpoty a kiss from Mama. Yours, Amber. Since nobody understood the language, an appropriate message was sent back without Lin Powers ever knowing that the love of his life had corralled a Chinese speaker and managed to drop him a note.

  Linpoty became Lin Po 2 when he reached his second birthday and learned how to pick out his name on an English keyboard. The minions spoiled him, giving him horseback rides around the room, racing him to the toilet, and fetching him malted milk balls and gummy bears from the Institute’s snack bar, The Brainless Robot.

  A year later, Sporty Jim Joe discovered that Li Po 2 could accurately copy strings of logograms glimpsed on the screen, and declared him a genius. The boy possessed an extraordinary memory. At six, he could lisp The Great Index to The Book of Rules forward and backward, and he was placed on the Institute payroll. He spent his childhood memorizing the remainder of The Book of Rules and was named Heir of the Chinese Room at the tender age of eleven. Pictograms and ideograms dotted his childish drawings, though no one could tell him what they signified. The former Li Po, now Li Po 1, lavished love and attention on the little boy, although he never gave up hope that Amber would come boomeranging back to the Institute.

  “Am, Flower of my Heart! How happy we would be,” he often said, and sighed. Then Li Po 2 would put a consoling arm around his father’s neck.

  As years passed, the occasional minion died and was removed from the room. An intelligent man who loved the sweets at The Brainless Robot, Frederick “the Great” was first to go. Such events were distressing to them all.

  Meanwhile, Li Po 2 became a young man. Out of boredom, he obtained online degrees in physics, women’s studies, and computer programming, and he contributed notes and papers to a wide range of journals. He scribbled a great deal of appallingly bad poetry, which he converted into Chinese characters and sent to poetry contests on the other side of the world. This activity necessitated the making of The Heir’s Illegal Supplementary Index to The Book of Rules, linking certain Han characters to the English words used in his poems. The tedious job consumed much of his free time but was certainly more useful than the jigsaw puzzles that absorbed the minions. It was peculiar, but no stranger than anything else about the Chinese Room, that he managed to collect a good many definitions without actually knowing the language.

  When his father became ill, the Institute organized a celebratory dinner and presented the Master with yet another gold medal and a valuable lidded vase with a thick, raspberry-colored glaze. When Li Po 1 thanked the Board of Trustees and the Head for giving him “a noble cause” that had made his life “a thing of mystery and challenge,” a stampede of claps and stomps rumbled the very walls of the Institute.

  Not long afterward, he took to his bed. The Institute sent in a series of doctors, but there was no help for his disease. A priest came to hear the confession of the Master’s harmless life, and tendered him the sacraments. The minions sat about in corners, dampening their pocket handkerchiefs. Li Po and son secretly hoped for the same visitor, who did not arrive.

  Eventually, the very last day—that day that is almost never the current day—dawned for the sick man.

  Li Po 2 sat by his father’s side.

  “It’s a language nobody can read,” the Master of the Chinese Room muttered once, as death came near.

  Later on, he plucked at his son’s sleeve.

  “I see,” he said, and died.

  Minions cremated the body and placed it in the raspberry-colored Chinese pot that proved, conveniently, to be not a vase but an urn.

  The new Master of the Chinese Room, already affluent in his own right, was now heir to a fortune. He hired a private dick to search for Amber, but the trail went cold at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, in a surf-board shop on the sands. A second and even a third investigator found nothing further.

  After wrestling with grief over the death of his father and the inability to dredge up any more news of his mother, the Master determined to devote his life to carrying on the legacy of Lin Powers, Sr., or Li Po 1. The days would stream on, bounded by the narrow channel that was the Chinese Room.

  And so they did for a time.

  Early one morning, he made a fateful discovery.

  It seemed that Li Po 2 had memorized far too many rules—or perhaps had worked too long on the Illegal Supplementary Index—and could now fully understand the complex written language of Chinese. This metamorphosis of the mind upended all his plans. For many days, he conceived of this ch
ange as an illness that might pass. Like his father before him, the sufferer took to his bed and let the minions answer messages. By this time, they were adept with The Book of Rules. The ostensibly ill Master spent his time composing poetry in Chinese. He reveled in the language, strewing the bed with lyrics about nature and eros. Since his knowledge of these topics was slight, the poems were notable for their aura of intense but vague longing and their fantastic landscapes. The former jockeys, who had experience with the sicknesses of horses, ladled out chicken-neck soup and fussed over him, insisting on taking his temperature every hour, rubbing him down with rough towels, and bringing him the remains of Linpoty’s chewable vitamins. They made it difficult for poetry. At last surging up from the bed, the patient bolted from the Chinese Room and rushed to the bank of elevators. As the Head strode about in agitation, the unfortunate young Master explained what had happened. But once done, the thing could not be undone. Soon the Institute thanked Lin Powers, Jr., aka. Li Po 2, for many years of service and bestowed on him a pension, a lifetime membership in the Institute, and a gold medal on a scarlet ribbon. The surviving minions vowed to continue the work, though the mourning at the loss of their beloved boy was terrific to behold, one of the little old men having gotten a job lot of sackcloth and a bucket of ashes. Lin was touched to find that they loved him so deeply, regarding him as their own child.

  Before he passed through the labyrinthine corridors of the Institute for what might be the last time, the now former Master decided to visit the chamber where L performed the mindless work that he and his father had done, replying to messages in Chinese according to a set pattern of rules embedded in a program. Though the minions had sometimes used the space for storage, now the room was almost empty. He waited in the single chair, watching as L woke and answered stray questions from a few people on the other side of the world. During the night, L sent and received text messages for three hours. Tears came into Lin’s eyes as he realized that many of his father’s endearments popped up like refrains in the computer’s responses. The programmer must have known him well.