The Chinese Room thought experiment was first proposed by the American philosopher John Searle in the early 1980s. This experiment requires you to imagine a person who speaks only English in a room where he carries a book with a Chinese translation program. There is enough papers, pencils and cabinets in the room. Papers with Chinese questions are sent into the room through a small window. People in the room can use his book to translate the text and reply in Chinese. Although he does not speak Chinese at all, through this process, people in the room can make anyone outside the room think he speaks fluent Chinese.

Can machines have ideas? This is an old problem. Turing has designed a Turing test. If the machine passes this test, we should admit it is thinking. The Turing test is like this: Put a computer and a normal person in two rooms, then ask questions. You analyze the answers to find out which one is the machine. If you can't distinguish, then this machine pass the test to be regarded having the same thought as people. Searle created the “Chinese Room” thought experiment to refute the idea that computers can really think. People in the room can't speak Chinese, but he can make people think he can speak Chinese fluently. Computers cannot really understand the information they receive, but they can run a program and give you a smart impression.

What is thinking? What does understand mean? Does the computer understand knowledge? To answer these questions, we need to understand what is the essence of knowledge? What is the ultimate source of human knowledge? What are the scientific methods of understanding? These questions are fundamental questions of philosophical epistemology.

In fact, it is not difficult to answer these questions. To understand where human knowledge comes from, one should first think about where people come from. People evolved from animals, so human understanding must have evolved from animal recognition. Then how do animals recognize the world? Animal recognition comes from conditioned reflex, so almost all of human knowledge comes from conditioned reflex. There is no essential difference in the process of conditioned reflex between human and animal.