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by Barrin92
766 days ago
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>The fact that they are performed by a self-aware human is completely irrelevant to the setup Granted, but we can easily create a more clear example that addresses both of your objections, right? Say in the room is a colorblind person with a machine that detects properties of color. If someone now asks you questions about colored objects you can answer them, but I assume you grant that neither the colorblind person, nor the machine, nor the two as a system have conscious experiences of color vision as you have. The conscious experience has nothing to do with function. Every physical property you can describe without necessary experiencing any of it. And I don't think your assertion about Searle's belief is correct. (or at least I don't believe that). If you fully simulated a physical brain, down to the atom, I think the experience in the simulation is probably equivalent to the experience outside. But if you merely model outward functions of conscious agents, behavior that is, there's no reason at all to assume all those systems must be conscious or have experiences. |
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It really depends on the setup. If the system is primed with knowledge of what color various things are (so e.g. it can say that grass is green because it is in the knowledge base), then, no, it does not experience color vision. It's just regurgitating facts.
On the other hand, if you actually have some kind of sensor that is capable of perceiving color, and you provide the output of that sensor to the colorblind person inside the room, who interprets the signals (say, represented as numbers) according to the rules, and those rules result in the system as a whole being able to say things like "apple is red" when presented with a red apple, then yes, I would in fact argue that the system does consciously experience color vision.
> And I don't think your assertion about Searle's belief is correct.
Searle claimed that computers "merely" use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no "understanding" of semantics, and that Chinese room demonstrates that this is not sufficient for consciousness. This was not just about correctly modelling outward functions, though - quite obviously, the room has a lot going on inside, and of course you can model neural nets without physically simulating neurons, either. Quite frankly Searle's attempt to make some kind of qualitative distinction between biology and computation is nonsensical, because it's the same physics all the way down, and it is all representable as computation.