[eru]

> What if the person in the room takes a coffee break or goes on vacation?

Regular meat-and-bone people lose consciousness all the time, and regain it later. No big deal.

> What connects the next computational step they do to the previous one and the next...

Whatever index card system or similar the operating procedure in the room prescribes for keeping track of state?

> which then somehow gives rise to a fragment of qualia. That seems like an impossibly complex and unlikely scientific theory.

We don't have any 'scientific theory' of qualia. We don't even know if they exist, or how they would manifest in the physical world.

Since we don't know much of anything, I don't know whether a fragment of a figment would be more or less weird than the figment itself. Or whether we would even have fragments.

It's probably too early to try to have a theory of qualia that would apply here?

[aneil]

> Whatever index card system or similar the operating procedure in the room prescribes for keeping track of state?

You're missing the point. A bit is just some electrons. It could be a scribble in a notebook. But consciousness integrates several pieces of information into a coherent experience. The bits in an index card system could as well be some scratchings of graphite in a notebook. How would consciousness arise from graphite in a notebook?

> We don't have any 'scientific theory' of qualia. We don't even know if they exist,

I differ on this. The only thing I know for certain the universe contains is qualia. You, the idea there is a "me", atoms, bits, axons and electric potentials are merely ideas, which "I" apprehend as qualia.

> or how they would manifest in the physical world.

Correct, that is the question. But the Chinese room thought experiment shows it's not merely by information processing. I mean, atoms in a room are processing information - they are computing the next state of all of the atoms in the room. Are they conscious? How about a subset of those atoms? Are those conscious in a different way?

The point is that the consciousness-is-computation idea is just too weak to even be a physical theory.

[aneil]

> Regular meat-and-bone people lose consciousness all the time, and regain it later. No big deal.

So what? There are lots of REAL physical processes that are disrupted in a human being when they lose consciousness.

The point of the Chinese Room is to show that information processing alone is insufficient for consciousness. For example is information processing happening when the person pauses for a minute - or not? For a second, for a millisecond? What about when the pen comes off the paper? What about when he's sharpening his pencil? How exactly does the consciousness=information processing idea work for these situations? It's a nonsense idea that doesn't hold up to careful inspection.

And it's exactly akin to saying we get nuclear power by simulating a nuclear power plant in a computer.

On the other hand, if we believe that consciousness is like an ordinary physical property of the universe, either emergent or fundamental, then it should be related to other physical properties, just as electromagnetism is to mass and energy.

[eru]

Information _is_ a physical property. That's what thermodynamics is all about.