Wubifying the Chinese Room : procedural and declarative memory at the syntax-semantics interface

45 years ago, the American philosopher John Searle used the "Chinese Room" thought experiment to criticise the "strong AI" claim that a computer is not merely a "tool in the study of the mind", but really is a mind in the sense that "computers given the right programs can be literally said to "understand" and have other cognitive states". On the basis of Searle’s distinction between the semantic and syntactic functions of language, we consider the "strong AI" hypothesis in the light of modern LLM-NLPs and investigate how such innovations can be used to clarify the theory and enhance the process of foreign language acquisition by human subjects. Extending Searle’s thought experiment, we imagine that its subject, Bob, has been situated in the Chinese Room for an arbitrarily long period of time. His ability to produce valid sequences of Chinese characters in a communication context is being evaluated by a Chinese speaker located outside the Chinese Room according to the criteria: (a) Is he human? (b) Does he know Chinese? We hypothesise that Bob’s attribution of semantic meaning to these sequences of symbols over the course of regularly manipulating them according to formal syntactic rules in a dialogic context will result in his effectively becoming proficient in the language. Such a process of language acquisition can be described in terms of the gradual development and combination of procedural and declarative memory functions. To evaluate the hypothesis and provide a parametrisation framework for the Chinese Room, we describe an approach to learning and using Chinese that is primarily based around the manipulation of sequences of Chinese characters using the Wubi typing input method. A potential means by which Bob may obtain a certificate of Chinese-speaking humanity is described as a system of Wubi-Emoji-Semantic-Mnemonics (WESM).