Whether the mind is equivalent to the brain is an open question. If someone built an artificial mind, that would massively raise my belief in the possibility th

Whether the mind is equivalent to the brain is an open question. If someone built an artificial mind, that would massively raise my belief in the possibility that the mind is purely physical. But I hold that this is vastly more difficult than assumed. My point with the Lord of the Rings was precisely that you give the books to a person who hasn't read them, and give them a few weeks to work through them. A Chinese Room would take vastly longer to "process" the book and it's "understanding" (represented symbolically) would take up vastly more room than the book itself. Even to understand simple word problems (to do with arranging blocks, for example), the algorithm used by the Room would have to explicitly encode our implicit knowledge of spatial relationships, and be able to apply this knowledge to arbitrary problems. To understand literature at a human level, the algorithm would have to encode standard knowledge of human psychology, society, physics, etc. In principle this could all be performed with a giant lookup table -- but such a table would be the size of several solar systems' worth of matter. So I don't hold that a Chinese Room is impossible in principle, but I do hold that building a practical AI would require great advances in the understanding of our own consciousness.