[IanCal]

The Chinese room has the outputs being the same, that’s really key in this.

> consciousness and understanding

After decades of this I’ve settled on the view that these words are near useless for anything specific, only vague pointers to rough concepts. I see zero value in nailing down the exact substrates understanding is possible on without a way of looking at two things and saying which one does and which one doesn’t understand. Searle to me is arguing that it is not possible at all to devise such a test and so his definition is useless.

[siglesias]

He’s not arguing that it’s not possible to devise such a test. He’s saying, lay out the features of consciousness as we understand them, look for what causes them in the brain, look for that causal mechanism in other systems.

Although for whatever it’s worth most modern AIs will tell you they don’t have genuine understanding (eg no sense of what pleasure is or feels like etc aside from human labeling).

[IanCal]

> He’s not arguing that it’s not possible to devise such a test.

The entire point of the thought experiment is that to outside observers it appears the same as if a fluent speaker is in the room. There aren’t questions you can ask to tell the difference.

[siglesias]

That's not the entire point, but it is the a big part of the premise. The entire point, on the contrary, is that the system inside the room does not have anything with conscious understanding of Chinese DESPITE passing the Turing Test. It's highlighting precisely that there's an ontological difference between the apparent behavior of the system and the reality of it.

[IanCal]

Of course it’s the point, the systems are not distinguishable by behaviour only what’s inside them. There are not tests to determine what’s inside, otherwise the whole thing is pointless.

This was why I have the tin of beans comparison.

The room has the property X if and only if there’s a tin of beans inside. You can’t in any way tell the difference between a room that has a tin of beans in and one that doesn’t without looking inside.

You might find that a property that has zero predictive power, makes (by definition) no difference to what either room can do, and has no use for any practical purposes (again by definition) is rather pointless. I would agree.

Searle has a definition of understanding that, to me, cannot be useful for any actual purpose. It is therefore irrelevant to me if any system has his special property just as my tin of beans property is useless.

[siglesias]

Again, it’s not an epistemological test. In reality the material difference between a computing machine and a brain is trivial. It’s showing there’s a categorical difference between the two. BTW—ethically it matters a great deal. If one system is conscious or another, that gives it moral status. Among other practical differences such as guarantee of function over long term.

[IanCal]

And again you assign a property or not to things that perform indistinguishably. Your definition is useless. It may as well be based on the tin of beans.

> In reality the material difference between a computing machine and a brain is trivial

No it isn’t. You are making the strong statements about how the brain works that you argued against at the start.

> Among other practical differences such as guarantee of function over long term.

Once again ignoring the setup of the argument. The solution to the chinese room isn’t “the trick is to wait long enough”.

I don’t know why you want to argue about this given you so clearly reject the entire concept of the thought experiment.

I find the entire thing to be intellectual wankery. A very simple and ethical solution is that if two things appear conscious from the outside then just treat them both as such. Job done. I don’t need to find excuses like “ah but inside there’s a book!” Or “it’s manipulations are on the syntactic level if we just look inside” or “but it’s just valves!” I can simply not mistreat anything that appears conscious.

All of this feels like a scared response to the idea that maybe we’re not special.

[Kim_Bruning]

Most elegant tin of beans I've seen in a while.

If I understand your argument: if there's no empirical consequence, what's the point of the distinction, right?

[siglesias]

lol. Imagine a husband arguing to his wife: if you can't tell that I'm cheating on you, what's the point of the distinction of faithful vs. not?