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>Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it Sure, but it's precisely because everything is governend by laws that you can't make i

>Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it Sure, but it's precisely because everything is governend by laws that you can't make it how you want. It's perfectly possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic brains rather than digital computers. I can understand the laws that govern the properties of the Golden Gate Bridge, doesn't mean I can build it out of jello. That was precisely the misunderstood point of Searle's Chinese room by the way, that a digital algorithmic computer can emulate the work that a human mind can do even the point of being indistinguishable from it, but need not understand any of it (i.e. being conscious of it) while doing so. Or put differently that manipulation of syntax and semantics are completely orthogonal. That's in fact very relevant in LLMs. An LLM can talk about how strawberries taste as if it was conscious, but by definition it can't genuinely have experienced it.

PeterisP 2y ago
But organic brains aren't some magic unknowable mush, we know how they work on a low level, we can trace how visual processing is done, etc, etc. As far as we see, the raw computing capabilities of biological neurons that we understand are sufficient to explain the behavior of animals, and as far as we see, biological brains don't do anything that can't be replicated with sufficiently powerful digital computers. So while it's technically possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic brains, we have no evidence at all that it would be the case and some (although not conclusive) evidence that there's nothing special, so unless we identify some difference, those hypotheses are not comparable and we should assume that according to our best current knowledge there aren't any specific properties of organic brains.
int_19h 2y ago
You can simulate the Golden Gate Bridge on a sufficiently powerful computer, though, such that the simulation will behave exactly like the real thing. Chinese room is a good example of begging the question, since the postulate that "understanding" is somehow distinct from observable behavior of the system implies the outcome. But from a materialist perspective, Chinese room, considered as a whole, does understand what it does. The fact that the man inside of it does not is simply irrelevant to the question.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >Chinese room, considered as a whole, does understand what it does. The fact that the man inside of it does not is simply irrelevant Searle does address this point even in the original paper. That argument doesn't hold water because you can imagine taking the whole room and putting it in your head and then you still don't understand Chinese. Or put differently if you're a Mandarin speaker and we two sit in a room and I use you to secretly translate, you understand the meaning of what is being said, I don't and it doesn't mean anything to say we "as a system do". The point is that even though we can "as a system" behave as if we speak Mandarin, there's a difference between you and me. You understand what you're talking about, and I just hear gibberish. Searle is a die-hard materialist by the way, nothing of that violates materialism. What he isn't is a functionalist. What he is teasing out in the thought experiment is that a system that produces the same output as nother system does not need to be equivalent on the inside.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    That is still nonsense. If you take the whole room as a system and integrate it into your brain as a subsystem, then yes, you will understand Chinese. The reason why we have to speak of the room and the person inside as a system is because the real magic is in the instructions. The fact that they are performed by a self-aware human is completely irrelevant to the setup and is only there to confuse the matter. In your other example with two people, viewing them as a system doesn't make much sense because one of those people is redundant - you can leave just the person who speaks Mandarin, and that is sufficient for the whole to function. So they alone are "the system". And it also operates based on instructions, except that those instructions are stored in the person's head and executed by low-level processes in the brain. Searle believes that consciousness cannot be simulated as a digital computation, period. Given that any other physical process can be, this requires a belief that consciousness is somehow magically different from any other physical process in some unspecified way (that appears to be conjured out of thin air solely to make this one argument, at that). That is not materialism.
    - Barrin92 2y ago

PeterisP 2y ago

But organic brains aren't some magic unknowable mush, we know how they work on a low level, we can trace how visual processing is done, etc, etc. As far as we see, the raw computing capabilities of biological neurons that we understand are sufficient to explain the behavior of animals, and as far as we see, biological brains don't do anything that can't be replicated with sufficiently powerful digital computers. So while it's technically possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic brains, we have no evidence at all that it would be the case and some (although not conclusive) evidence that there's nothing special, so unless we identify some difference, those hypotheses are not comparable and we should assume that according to our best current knowledge there aren't any specific properties of organic brains.

int_19h 2y ago

You can simulate the Golden Gate Bridge on a sufficiently powerful computer, though, such that the simulation will behave exactly like the real thing. Chinese room is a good example of begging the question, since the postulate that "understanding" is somehow distinct from observable behavior of the system implies the outcome. But from a materialist perspective, Chinese room, considered as a whole, does understand what it does. The fact that the man inside of it does not is simply irrelevant to the question.

Barrin92 2y ago
>Chinese room, considered as a whole, does understand what it does. The fact that the man inside of it does not is simply irrelevant Searle does address this point even in the original paper. That argument doesn't hold water because you can imagine taking the whole room and putting it in your head and then you still don't understand Chinese. Or put differently if you're a Mandarin speaker and we two sit in a room and I use you to secretly translate, you understand the meaning of what is being said, I don't and it doesn't mean anything to say we "as a system do". The point is that even though we can "as a system" behave as if we speak Mandarin, there's a difference between you and me. You understand what you're talking about, and I just hear gibberish. Searle is a die-hard materialist by the way, nothing of that violates materialism. What he isn't is a functionalist. What he is teasing out in the thought experiment is that a system that produces the same output as nother system does not need to be equivalent on the inside.
- int_19h 2y ago
  That is still nonsense. If you take the whole room as a system and integrate it into your brain as a subsystem, then yes, you will understand Chinese. The reason why we have to speak of the room and the person inside as a system is because the real magic is in the instructions. The fact that they are performed by a self-aware human is completely irrelevant to the setup and is only there to confuse the matter. In your other example with two people, viewing them as a system doesn't make much sense because one of those people is redundant - you can leave just the person who speaks Mandarin, and that is sufficient for the whole to function. So they alone are "the system". And it also operates based on instructions, except that those instructions are stored in the person's head and executed by low-level processes in the brain. Searle believes that consciousness cannot be simulated as a digital computation, period. Given that any other physical process can be, this requires a belief that consciousness is somehow magically different from any other physical process in some unspecified way (that appears to be conjured out of thin air solely to make this one argument, at that). That is not materialism.
  - Barrin92 2y ago