[ecopoesis]

I've always thought that the Chinese Room proved just the opposite of what Searle thinks it does.

I think of it this way:

I have two rooms: one has a person who doesn't speak Chinese in it, but they have reference and books that allow them to translate incoming papers into Chinese perfectly.

The second room just someone who speaks Chinese, and can translate anything coming in perfectly.

Searle says that AIs are like person in room one: they don't know Chinese.

I would argue that is the wrong way to look at things. A better comparison is that an AI is like the system of room 1, which does know Chinese, and from observation is indistinguishable from the system of room 2. What's going on inside (a human with Chinese reference books vs a human who knows Chinese) doesn't matter, it's just internal processing.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.

If a machine claims to be conscious, and I can't tell it apart from another conscious being, who am I to say it isn't conscious?