I Am A Chinese Room

I am a Chinese room. Or, if you prefer more accuracy, an English room. Because, although not a single cell of my body understands the English language, somehow enough of them together in meaningful complexity can comprise a system that DOES understand the English language. My mouth and vocal cords call this system "me;" my fingers assert that it is "me" that types while my eyes watch letters appear on a screen. Not a single cell in my body understands English, understand. When I scraped cheek cells for middle school science class microscope labs, I did not accidentally murder poets and journalists. They're just cells. They're not very smart. And before cells even, they're just chains of molecules that describe the creation of the cell and the patterns they form in congregate. No ability to comprehend the difference between "hermetic" and "hermeneutic." But somehow, those cells and the patterns they form in congregate -- me -- does. My hands appear to understand English as they move across the keyboard, hastily backspacing over irrelevant digression; remove them from the system (i.e., chop them off) and suddenly they are useless.

I am a Chinese room. I have no idea where my thoughts come from. From my perspective they just... come to me. After they have come I can look back and sort of see where they came from, or guess where they come from, but when they come they come unannounced. Some thoughts I can hold on to and manipulate a little, some thoughts I shove away as swiftly as I can; but this is the description of someone experiencing thoughts, not thinking them. I have never seen my brain. I am only accepting as the most likely model that what I have been told is correct; that there is a brain inside my skull that thinks these thoughts that come to me. But I have never seen my brain. I have never seen my skull either but I can feel it. Never seen my brain. If it turned out that I was literally a Chinese room, that there was a tiny homunculus with a huge book and a filing cabinet and a pen and paper in my skull, and the sensory inputs from the outside world come to him to compute and process a response to, that would only be slightly weirder than the model I'm supposed to accept, the model I more or less do accept.

I am a Chinese room, and if you're not one too, you might just be a p-zombie.