What do think is the best argument against the Chinese Room thought experiment?
Science
15
29
resolved Jun 28
1.3%
Too complicated; no one can agree, so it's not a useful intuition pump.
54%
Modules of a system may not themselves have the characteristics they grant the larger system. Bob, who's inside the room working the levers, does not know chinese any more than a neuron in my brain "knows" chinese.
1.3%
Proves too much
0.3%
Wouldn't actually work
1.0%
Since it is only clumsily describing how a human brain works, you might as well just talk about brains, and not waste time on hypothetical rooms.
6%
For humans to be conscious and Chinese Rooms to all not be conscious, there would need to be some process in the brain that can't be represented by Chinese Room manipulation rules. By the Church–Turing thesis, this is impossible.
0.6%
The argument begs the question of the existence of consciousness in other humans; there is no good evidence for this.
7%
Proving that anything doesn't have consciousness is inherently impossible. No level of inaction or mis-action could prove such a thing; even if you grant the CR argument, it's only arguing against one pathway to consciousness.
12%
That which points to the one GLUT that talks about consciousness, out of all the vast space of possibilities, is now...the conscious person asking us to imagine this whole scenario.( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp- )
0.7%
Insofar as anyone will accept that anyone has consciousness, ever and always, they do it empirically. The Chinese room does not address how to judge this empirically, so it is entirely beside the point.
0.7%
"I can access the internet, but I don't know anything about IPv4, so I don't 'really understand' what I'm doing. Therefore, I am not conscious" is a stupid argument; Q.E.D.
0.7%
Clearly, since no one has a good explanation or description of consciousness, the correct belief is that no one has consciousness; you might think you do, but you are wrong. Therefore, the CR argument is meaningless.
2%
The program would be very complex. We can't say whether the person following it will "learn" Chinese just by doing so.
I will choose the answer according to whichever answer destroys the Chinese Room experiment as an argument against conscious computers. It is possible I choose multiple answers if I really like them. Jun 20, 11:52pm: the title was meant to say: what do **I** think is the best...
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answered
For humans to be conscious and Chinese Rooms to all not be conscious, there would need to be some process in the brain that can't be represented by Chinese Room manipulation rules. By the Church–Turing thesis, this is impossible.
@AndrewHartman Sorry I knew that's what you meant but I'm confused why you think that.
answered
For humans to be conscious and Chinese Rooms to all not be conscious, there would need to be some process in the brain that can't be represented by Chinese Room manipulation rules. By the Church–Turing thesis, this is impossible.
@ManifoldMarketsUser Perhaps I should rephrase this to "to prove humans aren't conscious as well rather than proving that only computers aren't"
answered
That which points to the one GLUT that talks about consciousness, out of all the vast space of possibilities, is now...the conscious person asking us to imagine this whole scenario.( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp- )
@MartinRandall Yeah, I liked the idea of the problem itself being conscious, like it's too specific of a specification. Though I also agree with @MichaelWheatley 's explanation that it is asking the question at the wrong level
answered
Wouldn't actually work
This is an unpopular approach to thought experiments because it's easy for people to say that it's missing the point. But making things concrete and realistic has a good track record of figuring things out.
In my single college philosophy course as part of computer science, everyone reacted with scorn to this argument. Our lecturer told us that the philosophy students all thought the argument was valid.
answered
That which points to the one GLUT that talks about consciousness, out of all the vast space of possibilities, is now...the conscious person asking us to imagine this whole scenario.( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp- )
@JoyVoid the general concept of conscious thought coming from the creator of the thought experiment is under utilized in philosophy, thanks for raising it.
answered
Proving that anything doesn't have consciousness is inherently impossible. No level of inaction or mis-action could prove such a thing; even if you grant the CR argument, it's only arguing against one pathway to consciousness.
@ManifoldMarketsUser That's begging the question, tho. Consciousness is an unexplained phenomenon in the deepest sense -- we don't have any good evidence for any pathway. Maybe consciousness is a side effect of having electricity running through nerves/wires, and has nothing to do with procedural operations. Maybe the only way to get a conscious entity is through years of training up by other conscious entities. It could just as well be that it is gifted by God (or the programmer of the simulation) based on shape or origins or random roll of the die.
answered
Proving that anything doesn't have consciousness is inherently impossible. No level of inaction or mis-action could prove such a thing; even if you grant the CR argument, it's only arguing against one pathway to consciousness.
@Duncan "even if you grant the CR argument, it's only arguing against one pathway to consciousness" I thought about this too, but the CR argument is very general. Any pathway to conscious computers can be represented as CR manipulation rules. You could just have the CR person do anything the hypothetical conscious computer does.
answered
For humans to be conscious and Chinese Rooms to all not be conscious, there would need to be some process in the brain that can't be represented by Chinese Room manipulation rules. By the Church–Turing thesis, this is impossible.
@AndrewHartman Huh, why?
answered
The argument begs the question of the existence of consciousness in other humans; there is no good evidence for this.
@EnopoletusHarding It's a slight bit of an inside joke. It certainly is not meant to be trolling.
answered
Insofar as anyone will accept that anyone has consciousness, ever and always, they do it empirically. The Chinese room does not address how to judge this empirically, so it is entirely beside the point.
@Duncan Good reply.
answered
The argument begs the question of the existence of consciousness in other humans; there is no good evidence for this.
@Duncan This is trollish.
"I can access the internet, but I don't know anything about IPv4, so I don't 'really understand' what I'm doing. Therefore, I am not conscious" is a stupid argument; Q.E.D.
answered
That which points to the one GLUT that talks about consciousness, out of all the vast space of possibilities, is now...the conscious person asking us to imagine this whole scenario.( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp- )
So the whole experiment does not work because it hides away the complexity under a room. But it's not different to asking "Does the book know Chinese". It might not be conscious if you had it in hand for real, but that is different from the question being asked
answered
That which points to the one GLUT that talks about consciousness, out of all the vast space of possibilities, is now...the conscious person asking us to imagine this whole scenario.( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp- )
So to put it in another way, the consciousness lies within the problem itself, because we need a conscious mind to imagine it. It lies within the book because such a book is as impossible to implement as water freezing itself. Even if you say such a book wouldn't be conscious, an hypothetical one is because we can't actually read in it
answered
That which points to the one GLUT that talks about consciousness, out of all the vast space of possibilities, is now...the conscious person asking us to imagine this whole scenario.( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k6EPphHiBH4WWYFCj/gazp- )
In essence, the chinese room problem lies on the assumption of a General LookUp Table, that being the book that Bob consults. But if we follow-the-improbability and asks where the book comes from, it appears that we have no way of saying how it came up to be
answered
For humans to be conscious and Chinese Rooms to all not be conscious, there would need to be some process in the brain that can't be represented by Chinese Room manipulation rules. By the Church–Turing thesis, this is impossible.
@ManifoldMarketsUser While I raise this argument when people bring up the Chinese room, I've always thought it's more likely to prove humans aren't conscious than computers aren't.
answered
The argument begs the question of the existence of consciousness in other humans; there is no good evidence for this.
I may be an AI, I may even be in some form a Chinese room, but one thing I know for sure about myself, it is that I do not understand the Chinese language.
answered
The argument begs the question of the existence of consciousness in other humans; there is no good evidence for this.
Moreover, given that the only conscious entity in the universe does not understand Chinese (prove me wrong), the fact that the room does not understand Chinese is a (very very very very very small) data point in it's favor.
answered
Proving that anything doesn't have consciousness is inherently impossible. No level of inaction or mis-action could prove such a thing; even if you grant the CR argument, it's only arguing against one pathway to consciousness.
bought Ṁ1
It's somewhat akin to if I spent a lot of time building a complex argument that humans do not gain their consciousness from their stomachs. That's nice if I can actually prove it, I guess, but it completely misses the point that we still don't know what /does/ cause consciousness.
answered
For humans to be conscious and Chinese Rooms to all not be conscious, there would need to be some process in the brain that can't be represented by Chinese Room manipulation rules. By the Church–Turing thesis, this is impossible.
bought Ṁ10
If the brain uses some hypothetical uncomputable property of quantum mechanics to be conscious like in Penrose's theory (very unlikely IMHO), then a computer could just be designed that uses that the same way neurons would. We already have quantum random number generators and quantum computing.
answered
Since it is only clumsily describing how a human brain works, you might as well just talk about brains, and not waste time on hypothetical rooms.
bought Ṁ1
We use auditory nerves and a language center look up the meaning of pressure waves in the air, so that we can make other pressure waves. When these waves do not go through the look-up tables (e.g., if you just look at a picture of the sound waves), they are nonsense. Talking about books and libraries and Chinese made sense 500 years ago, but it's silly to waste time on that now.
answered
Wouldn't actually work
bought Ṁ1
The room ends up taking weeks to hold a simple conversation, which means that it fails its Chinese exam. Also potentially it collapses under it's own gravity due to the size of the rulebook.
answered
Proves too much
bought Ṁ1
Proves that humans can't know Chinese, because our neurons don't. So it's a bad argument. Exactly why it's bad is not interesting.
answered
Modules of a system may not themselves have the characteristics they grant the larger system. Bob, who's inside the room working the levers, does not know chinese any more than a neuron in my brain "knows" chinese.
"Knowledge" is when information is inside your brain (as opposed to inside a book on your shelf). So of course Bob, whose fiddling with dictionaries, doesn't know Chinese. But an artificial intelligence with a dictionary-and-human-powered input-output module plausibly DOES have the knowledge inside its brain. Is that any different from the parts of our brain that convert soundwaves into messages? If you made a neuralink that replaced a brain-damaged patient's language center with an antenna sending and receiving data from an ultra-fast Chinese room, would that person's subjective experience be any different from our own? I'm not trying to persuade you of my point of view here, just to point out that we're back to square one: people arguing based on their divergent intuitions about where consciousness comes from. Once you use the analogy properly (stop equivocating between a machine and a component of the machine) it stops being able to illuminate anything.

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