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The difference is that we all have the subjective experience of understanding. When we have a conversation, we experience other people's words as sounds in our

by slibhb 5y ago

The difference is that we all have the subjective experience of understanding. When we have a conversation, we experience other people's words as sounds in our heads laden with meaning. We "understand" each word in the sentence, how the words fit together, what they refer to, and so on. We're all familiar with this experience, right? We're doing it right now through the medium of writing. Searle takes that experience seriously. For him it's real and, in order to have that experience, you need machinery somewhat similiar to what we have. He can't bring himself to believe that a list of instructions and a person dumbly executing them have that sensation of understanding even if they produce the correct output.

simonh 5y ago
I take that experience seriously too. I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. I don't think he has any good reason to believe otherwise, or any good argument against it. Nothing he says about the mechanisms of the Chinese room can't also be said about the mundane physical mechanisms of neurology.
- slibhb 5y ago
  > I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. Neither does Searle. He says that humans are such machines. Per Searle, if you want to build a system that has subjective experiences of consciousness and understanding, it would have to have physical parts that correspond to some degree to the physical parts that give rise to our subjective experiences (or an animal's subjective experiences). It couldn't be a list of instructions to be executed. I don't know if Searle is right about this but I find myself unable to dismiss his argument as obviously wrong.
  - simonh 5y ago
    You don't think it's obvious that actual computers and robots have physical parts? I'm sorry, I'm at a loss.

by slibhb 5y ago

simonh 5y ago

I take that experience seriously too. I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. I don't think he has any good reason to believe otherwise, or any good argument against it. Nothing he says about the mechanisms of the Chinese room can't also be said about the mundane physical mechanisms of neurology.

slibhb 5y ago
> I don't see why a sufficiently advanced artificial system as complex, capable and sophisticated as a human brain could not also have experiences. Neither does Searle. He says that humans are such machines. Per Searle, if you want to build a system that has subjective experiences of consciousness and understanding, it would have to have physical parts that correspond to some degree to the physical parts that give rise to our subjective experiences (or an animal's subjective experiences). It couldn't be a list of instructions to be executed. I don't know if Searle is right about this but I find myself unable to dismiss his argument as obviously wrong.
- simonh 5y ago
  You don't think it's obvious that actual computers and robots have physical parts? I'm sorry, I'm at a loss.