> Dr. John Searle's objection is that software is not a mind, and goes on to explain why with his Chinese Room thought experiment. I always found that experime

> Dr. John Searle's objection is that software is not a mind, and goes on to explain why with his Chinese Room thought experiment. I always found that experiment to be extremely unconvincing, to put it mildly. Using that framework I can prove that you are not conscious. I construct a "english room". You are in the back without any contact to the outside world. A Chinese speaker in the front can pass messages to you from the outside world, in English by laborious copying. Clearly you aren't conscious because the Chinese speaker can't understand the English. Or, alternatively, no one would dispute a single neuron is not conscious and can't understand english. I pass signals into your neurons and through some electrochemical magic you reply in english, yet the neurons involved don't understand english therefor you aren't conscious. All Searle has done is picked out one component of a composite system, concluded that in isolation it has no clue whats going on, and from that concluded the system as a whole doesn't. We have a hard time clearly defining consciousness, and it's not clear if some AGI would be conscious (maybe it's just an emergent phenomena)-- it's also not clear if there would be any particular advantage in it being so. But in any case, I don't think the chinese room is a useful argument for anything.