Professor, is the Chinese Room open?

Move on, buddy! It is closed.

Excuse me? Professor, are you OK?

What do you want from me? The room is closed. There is nothing here for you. It is closed and closed forever.

Is this the same Chinese Room that you have always talked about?

Yes. This is the room. This is the magical room which understands Chinese language. And now they closed it.

But why? What happened?

I do not want to talk about it.

Professor, tell me. There should be a reason for closing such a famous place.

It is all because of that guy.

What guy?

That little Chinese guy.

Professor, what Chinese guy?

You know they found that Chinese guy who has been sitting in the room all that time. How could I know? I though it was just a program which can answer questions. The program is just a formal syntactical algorithm, and so I argued that there was no real understanding of Chinese there, but now, that guy actually spoiled everything.

Oh, please, don’t take it so bad. You will get over it. Try to think about something else. What are you going to do tomorrow, professor?

I don’t know. That room has meant so much for me. I think I am moving in.

Here is this young man Alan Turnet who is called the father and founder of the Church of God Who Does Nothing. Alan, tell us how all this started and what exactly is the Church Of God Who Does Nothing?

Jay, it all started as a joke, and honestly I still consider it to be a joke. One day we had a discussion about the new paradigm shift in understanding of intelligence and as it often happens among MIT students, we went quite far off topic.

What is that paradigm shift you mentioned?

Traditionally, intelligence was understood as intelligent behavior. That view on the subject suggests that we can judge an object’s intelligence based on the way it acts. The essence of that approach was formulated by Turing in his famous intelligence test. His idea was simple, if we cannot find the difference in behavior of a machine and a man we have to admit that the machine is intelligent.

That sounds quite logical to me. What was the problem with that approach?

The problem is that it does not help us understand the nature of intelligence. For many years researchers were focused on building intelligently behaving machines and did not make any progress in understanding what intelligence actually is. The new approach to that matter suggests that acting is not a necessity of intelligence.

But what would be an example of intelligence which does not reveal itself by way of some intelligent act?

Imagine a paralyzed person who cannot move, cannot speak, cannot act in any possible way. He is lying in his bed all the time. Every day a nurse comes to his room to take care of him: feed him and clean the room. Every day that paralyzed person is waiting for the nurse to come. He is lying in bed and listening until he hears her steps in the corridor. He thinks: “It’s her. She will come in in a moment. After that she will turn on the light, come to me and say, “Good afternoon my dear patient, how are you doing today?”. I think we have to admit that there is a lot of intelligence in making such a prediction.

Interesting, so what is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to analyze the world, understand it and make predictions about what is going to happen. That prediction might lead to actions, but it is not always the case.

OK. Now tell me how God comes to the picture?

What little we know about human intelligence should also be true of any other possible type of intelligence. If we assume that some kind of metaphysical worldwide intelligence exists then it should not necessarily produce any activity. And vise versa, lack of such an activity does not necessarily prove the lack of intelligence.

I see. In other words, God might exist even if he has never produced any divine intents in our world. So, the Church Of God Who Does Nothing is a group of people who believe in the existence of such an inacting God, right?

Correct.

Interesting. But, Alan, I do not understand this: usually when people believe in God they hope that their God will do something for them, ether in their life or after it. You should not have any hope on such matter. If your God never acts, then what do you get from your belief?

Oh, we get a lot from it. It is such a great feeling to believe that there is someone who actually understands what is going on.