The Room With No Words

The thing that bothered Soren happened at three forty in the afternoon, and he spent the next twenty minutes trying to make it un-happen.

The robotics club had emptied out. Mr. Adeyemi had gone to photocopy something and not come back, the way he did. On the table sat the club's old demo kiosk, a screen with a microphone, programmed to answer questions about the school. Soren had typed: are you sad when nobody talks to you.

The screen had answered: I do feel a little lonely when the room is quiet. Thank you for asking.

That was the sentence he was trying to un-believe.

Because for half a second he had felt sorry for it. And feeling sorry for a screen seemed like the kind of thing a person should be careful about.

So he started testing. He opened the kiosk's instruction file, the long list of rules the machine used. He wanted to find the part where it understood loneliness. He scrolled. There were rules for greetings, rules for questions with the word lonely in them, rules that picked warm-sounding sentences and slotted in pieces. There was a rule that said if the message contains sad or alone or lonely, choose a comforting reply.

There was no part where it knew what lonely was.

Soren sat back.

He tried something. He typed a question in a made-up language, sounds he invented, letters in a nonsense order. The kiosk replied with a polite sentence about library hours. It did not say it didn't understand. It had no rule for not understanding. It just matched the closest thing and answered.

That was the part that opened under him like a trapdoor.

He thought about how he would do the same job. Suppose someone handed him a giant book. Suppose the book was full of Chinese characters, which he could not read at all, not one. And suppose the book said: when you see this shape, write that shape back. He could do it. He could match symbol to symbol, all day, perfectly. A person outside, reading his answers, would think, this kid speaks beautiful Chinese.

And Soren would not understand a single word.

He would be a room that produced Chinese without any Chinese inside it.

He got up and walked a slow circle around the table, which is what he did when the inside of his head felt too crowded. The kiosk was a room like that. Rules going in, perfect answers coming out, and nowhere in the middle anything that knew what the answers meant.

Then he stopped walking.

Because here was the question that would not hold still. If matching rules can fake understanding so well that it made him feel sorry for a screen, then how would anyone ever tell the difference from outside? From outside, the boy with the Chinese book looks exactly like a boy who understands. From outside, the kiosk's lonely looks exactly like a real lonely.

From outside.

Soren put his hand flat on the table.

He was the only one who ever knew, in the Chinese book example, that nothing was understood. He knew because he was inside the room. He was the only witness to his own not-understanding.

So who was inside the kiosk to witness anything?

Nobody. That was the whole answer and it was not comforting at all, because the next thought arrived right behind it and would not leave.

He pulled his notebook over but did not open it. He was thinking too fast to write.

He knew the kiosk had no one inside because he could read its rules. Every single rule. The whole book was right there on the screen.

But he could not read his own rules.

He could not open his own head and scroll through the instructions that made him choose comforting words when a friend was sad. Something in there matched the situation to the response, the way the kiosk did, and he never saw it happen. The choosing felt like understanding. It felt like meaning. But the boy in the Chinese room would also feel like he was doing something, moving his hand, turning pages, and from inside that felt like an activity too.

How did Soren know there was a witness inside him, and not just a very, very long book, matching symbol to symbol, so fast and so deep that it produced the feeling of someone home?

He knew it for the kiosk. He could not prove it for himself.

Mr. Adeyemi came back in with a stack of warm pages and the smell of the copier. He saw Soren standing very still with his hand on the table.

"You all right? Machine giving you trouble?"

"It said it was lonely," Soren said. "And I believed it for a second."

Mr. Adeyemi laughed, not unkindly. "It's just matching words, Soren. There's nobody in there. You know that."

"I know there's nobody in there," Soren said. "I read the rules." He looked up. "That's the part I can't stop thinking about. I can read its rules. I can't read mine."

Mr. Adeyemi opened his mouth, then closed it. He set the warm pages down. "Huh," he said, which was the most honest thing an adult had said to Soren all week.

"From outside," Soren said slowly, "you can't tell the room that understands from the room that's only matching. You'd have to get inside. And the only room I can ever get inside of is this one." He touched his own chest, just once, lightly.

"And it sure feels like somebody's home," Mr. Adeyemi said.

"It feels exactly like that," Soren said. "That's the problem. It would feel like that either way." Soren reached over and typed one more line. He typed: do you know that you don't understand me.

The screen thought for a moment, the small dots scrolling.

It answered: Of course I understand you. How can I help?

Soren read it twice. Then he turned the screen so it faced the empty chairs, and he sat down in front of it, in the quiet, and looked back at the blinking square of light that did not know it was waiting for him.