[ThomPete]

The article you reference makes the same mistake as Searles Chinese room argument. It somehow assumes there is something magical about the human mind.

I had a brief argument with Robert Epstein (the author of that article) because I find the argument that humans don't actually store information to be quite misleadning and missing the point.

The most obvious mistake is this:

"We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not."

This is both true and false. It's true we don't do that like a computer but its wrong to claim that computers fundamentally do that too.

That happens several layers of abstraction up and so a computer fundamentally doesn't actually store an image or a word either it manipulates atoms and turns circuits on and off and several layers of abstraction up it gets translated into meaning first by machines then by humans.

Anyone who have a hard time believing machines can become sentient should first ask themselves why they have a harder time believing that than accepting that dumb immaterial matter somehow have become the pattern recognizing feedback loops that are us.

[Barrin92]

Searle's argument isn't that there is something 'magical' about the human mind, it is that biological systems are fundamentally different from mechanical or digital systems and that sentience (not intelligence!) is a unique feature of biological systems.

This argument deserves much more recognition than it gets because 1. it's at this point still empirically true, we have not observed non-organic sentient life and more importantly, because not Searle but everybody else employs 'magic'.

Searle's point is simple. Computation is subjective. Electricity flowing through a machine doing complex things is just a physical process like anything else. You (the sentient observer) classify that physical process as meaningful, but a computer is no more 'computing' things than a falling pen computes gravity.

So sentience really is related to physical agency and sensory experience in the world, which creates conscience in organic brains. That doesn't imply complexity or intelligence or understanding. Syntax and Semantics are different things. Your pocket calculator processes the syntax of mathematics, but it does not understand the semantics of mathematics. A compiler processes symbols according to rules, but it does not understand the meaning of the computation, it has no cognition. It might be very good at what it does, but it has no capacity to understand. That's the essence of the Chinese room, and it's still a convincing argument.

An even stronger point might be made, namely that sentience actually limits intelligence. That it requires a degree of slowness and introspection that is unsuited for fast decision-making. For a fictional treatment of this, Blindsight by Peter Watts is an excellent read.

[ThomPete]

It really don't in my opinion.

Of course, the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese just like the individual neuron in a Chines person doesn't understand Chinese.

It's the entire house where the person in the room is just one part of the entire system.

And yes he does imply that there is something magical about the way humans are pattern recognizing feedback loops vs. machines as humans came from immaterial matter ourselves if he doesn't his argument simply do not hold up as there is nothing magical either in the way human conscience is a byproduct of simpler systems all forming to become a scentient one.

If you can buy that humans have evolved from dumb atoms then you have too look that not how humans and "machines" are different but how they are the same.

The samenes is that we are pattern recognizing feedback loops and that our sentience comes out of something non-sentient.

So either something magical is in play or there is nothing that hinders machines to become sentient either from what we know.

A human consists of milions of sub-systems like a calculator and yet we are somehow sentient.

Furthermore there is no know upper limit to how complex silicon based systems can be and so the right answer really is if anything "we don't know" not "because the person in the room doesn't understand chinese it proves that systems can" the person in the room is not the system the entire house including everything happening outside of the room.

In other words unless searle is claiming magic at some level nothing, absolutely nothing indicates that machines can't become sentient.

With regards to your last point then that's the wrong way to look at it.

A better way to understand why it's possible is to start from omniscience and then realize that omniscience means you are aware of everything and thus have no perspective where as all systems that can handle information potentially can become sentient the more complex they become.

[cjauvin]

This is a very interesting interpretation of Searle's argument (which also has some overlap I believe with some of Douglas Hofstadter's ideas), and I will begin to read Blindsight shortly, as it seems a very intriguing novel.