| The argument is essentially that there are no qualia of Chinese comprehension in an automaton or in any system that uses an equivalent algorithm, whether or not run by a human. It's a sound argument to the extent that qualia clearly exist, but no one has any idea what they are, and even less of an idea how to (dis)prove that they exist in external entities. It's the materialists who are begging the question, because their approach to qualia is "Well obviously qualia are something that just happens and so what?" Unfortunately arguments based on "Well obviously..." have a habit of being embarrassingly unscientific. And besides - written language skills are a poor indicator of human sentience. Human sentience relies at least much on empathy; emotional reading of body language, expression, and linguistic subtexts; shared introspection; awareness of social relationships and behavioural codes; contextual cues from the physical and social environment which define and illuminate relationships; and all kinds of other skills which humans perform effortlessly and machines... don't. Turing Tests and game AI are fundamentally a nerd's view of human intelligence and interaction. They're so impoverished they're not remotely plausible. So as long as DALL-E has no obvious qualia, it cannot be described as sentient. It has no introspection and no emotional responses, no subjective internal state (as opposed to mechanical objective state), and no way to communicate that state even if it existed. And it also has no clue about 3D geometry. It doesn't know what a sphere, only what sphere-like shading looks like. Generally it knows the texture of everything and the geometry of nothing. Essentially it's a style transfer engine connected to an image search system which performs keyword searches and smushes them together - a nice enough thing, but still light years from AGI, never mind sentience. |
Even if it were about qualia, calling the argument sound “to the extent that” we don’t know enough to tell whether its premises are correct would be a misuse of ‘sound’ and a rather blatant case of burden-shifting - effectively saying “so prove me wrong!” to skeptics.
Materialists can and do make question-begging claims, but that does not somehow cancel out Searle’s own question-begging (furthermore, somewhat ironically, Searle describes himself as a materialist!)
The soundness of the argument cannot be established by showing that current technology is far from being strong AI, as the argument claims much more than just that - it claims it to be impossible in principle. Anyone making such a claim has assumed a heavy burden that demands stronger arguments than you are making here.