Yes, and then the analogy is used to refute this notion through a thinly disguised "but it is obvious! [that this isn't real]" fallacy (the fallacy is that it is not at all obvious that the Chinese Room is not sapient).

Yes, that's one way out: claiming that the Books+Person Room-System is itself sentient.

You can (and philosophers have!) make that case, but it seems very counter-intuitive to the way we experience conscientious as a unitary, embodied being.

> it seems very counter-intuitive to the way we experience conscientious as a unitary, embodied being

I don't see how it's counter-intuitive to anyone who is aware of various brain functions, for example. It's abundantly clear by now that it's not a unitary thing, but a set of traits.

I think the reason why people keep coming up with those "it's not a real thing" retorts is the same reason why (other) people reject the notion that some animals might be sapient enough for us to care about. We like being uniquely sapient, and that's just impossible with any sort of rational - i.e. mysticism-free - approach to intelligence and self-awareness and all that stuff.

Maybe others disagree, but I think it's quite obvious that there's a spectrum of sentience: animals like chimpanzees are very similar to ourselves, something like a cat or a dog is less sentient, and a barnacle or clam having very little sentience.

It's much less convincing to me to say that a computer (or an algorithm running on that computer?) is somewhere on that same spectrum.

Well, we are literally working on simulating living beings on computers, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

If we do that, wouldn't said simulation be an algorithm that ends up on your spectrum?

But also, I'm curious why your spectrum is defined the way it is - i.e. why a clam can have sentience, but not a laptop? Because one is organic, and the other one is not? But doesn't that imply that your definition of sentience inherently excludes anything artificial?

Theoretically, yes, I would assume a 100% accurately-simulated brain to be as sentient as the real thing (of course, then you can never turn it off without committing murder). Given that we don't fully understand the properties of a single neuron yet, I am deeply skeptical of the accuracy of these simulations.

Even in that wikipedia article you linked:

> These early attempts of simulation have been criticized for not being biologically realistic. Although we have the complete structural connectome, we do not know the synaptic weights at each of the known synapses. We do not even know whether the synapses are inhibitory or excitatory. To compensate for this the Hiroshima group used machine learning to find some weights of the synapses which would generate the desired behaviour. It is therefore no surprise that the model displayed the behaviour, and it may not represent true understanding of the system.

The common thread running through many of these comments is people who don't appreciate just how complex biology is, and how much we don't understand, are nevertheless confidently asserting that some Turning machine they can half-imagine will obviously be able to "think" the way a brain does.

The common thread is materialism. If you don't introduce any mystical entities such as a soul, it is inevitable that it's possible to construct something that operates indistinguishably from what we consider natural life - it's a question of engineering and biological research at that point. The question of whether it's 100 years removed from my laptop, or 1000 years, is a completely different one. It took humans literally millennia to get from horses to cars, yet both are on the same spectrum.

The Chinese Room argument essentially tries to make a point that it's impossible at any level of complexity. The only way that can be true is if you reject materialism entirely, and adopt the notion that there's something else that "bestows" intelligence on a brain, that cannot be replicated by any artificial physical means (but is somehow still replicated in utero). It's not really a verifiable claim, which is evident from the very design of the experiment - it says that there are things that appear intelligent to any possible test, but still aren't, because common sense, essentially.

The things can move just through the application of chemicals or air-pressure is counter-intuitive.

It seems like you've got a philosophy that is taking a person through a series of reasoning based stringing together back intuitions and ending up in the same place religion takes us.

Sure, I guess. Most of the responses in this thread are computer people trying to skirt around the "hard problem" of consciousness: http://www.consc.net/papers/facing.html

If you want to claim that what your brain does is basically a more complicated version of what your laptop does, then you're free to make that case, but I don't think you honestly believe it yourself. You do recognize your own inner life.

Well, while I'd both disagree with "hard problem" arguments and not see them as interesting, at least "hard problem" proponents will say directly there's some magic in humans that a computer can't have. Indeed, the "philosophical zombie" idea shows the magic is so transcendent that no evidence can determine whether a person has the magic (of qualia) or whether they are a dreaded Zombie.

In contrast, the Chinese Room argument jumps between "hard problem" metaphysics and the appearance of a materialistic perspective.

I recognize my inner life and consciousness, of course, but how and why would that preclude believing that they're manifestations of something that is only quantitatively different from my laptop? Quantity does matter.

Well, IMHO, it's counter-intuitive because a room full of index cards that can generate a reasonable reply to any Chinese sentence is counter-intuitive. I.e., unrealistic thought experiment is unrealistic.

The index cards are irrelevant. Pretend he wrote "a really fancy computer" if you like that better.

But the index cards are relevant! If we rewrite it as thus:

> There is a really fancy computer, and a person who has the switch. When the person turns on the switch, you can converse with the computer in Chinese. Does this fancy computer understand Chinese?

Then, well, at least I would say "Well, wasn't that the exact question you were trying to answer in the first place? What changed?"

No, it isn’t at all counterintuitive. E.g. my brain is a system of neurons and that system experiences consciousness. That is perfectly intuitive.

It could be a weaker argument: One can theoretically make a fully materialistic device acting in a way indistinguishable from consciousness.

Which still preserves the question: if you can reliably fake knowing Chinese, do you know Chinese?

Yeah, the thing about the argument is it mixes together two close but distinct arguments in a way that makes it harder to argue with either.

On the one hand, there's the implication that because it's just books and boxes & whatever, it can't do the impressive feat of speaking Chinese.

On the other hand, there's the implication that if it is a "room" or "computer" or something doing the speaking of Chinese, it can't "really" be doing it because it doesn't have the spark of life or a soul or whatever magic one might name.

And because the argument has a bit of both these claims to it, it is hard to address since a proponent can go back and forth between them.

That this argument was taken seriously by philosophers was rather disheartening to me when I discovered this, when it became obvious there really wasn't any more there than a colorful (but not particular relevant) metaphor.