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The Chinese room setup just hides the problem behind a facade, it does not solve the problem. Which is that as soon as you communicate to someone in the dinner

The Chinese room setup just hides the problem behind a facade, it does not solve the problem. Which is that as soon as you communicate to someone in the dinner party that you're running the experiment, it ceases to be a dinner party. It is certainly true that every constituent part of the colony doesn't need to contribute to any particular action to demonstrate sentience, any more than to demonstrate locomotion. But in the case of humans, an individual human is so clearly sentient and conscious that any experiment would be completely confounded if it involved communicating directly and consciously with any individual human. In your Chinese room, any sentience could just as easily be explained by one of the parties simply communicating directly with the experimenter as it could be by group sentience, and Occam's Razor would apply.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
A thing can be a dinner party and an experiment. Awareness of the experiment doesn't erase the dinner party, just as awareness of an experimenter doesn't erase the fact that people are still eating together. Both categories can overlap without contradiction. We do this all the time in our daily lives. Just the same, I can still be me and participate in an experiment. My identity doesn't collapse into “only subject” when I'm studied, and the same continuity of self applies to someone in the Chinese room. The role doesn't erase the person. Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a law. Applied too bluntly, it favors the easiest seeming explanation even when the phenomenon, like consciousness, is exactly the kind where every explanation comes with complexity, making "simplicity" a misleading standard. Occam's razor in social situations biases toward implicit social assumptions that smuggle their way into the conclusion without accounting for their contribution toward complexity. Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system? Nothing in the setup changes about who they are or what they're doing. Once we allow that kind of shifting interpretation, any conclusion about group sentience is dead before it begins.
- vannevar 1y ago
  >Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system? If one of the participants simply responds to queries from outside the room with their own thoughts, how does that show sentience for the dinner party as a system? No offense, but you are illustrating exactly the confusion I was referring to in my original comment. The tendency is to assume that the whole is as sentient as the parts, and in the case of human organizations, that is not true. I think the short explanation is that the human participation is highly constrained---the members are employing a very small subset of their human potential to play their limited role in the organization. And the communication rate between these "slivers of a human" is much lower than that between the components of a single human mind. So the emergent behavior of the system as a whole is much simpler than the operation of a single human mind.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

A thing can be a dinner party and an experiment. Awareness of the experiment doesn't erase the dinner party, just as awareness of an experimenter doesn't erase the fact that people are still eating together. Both categories can overlap without contradiction. We do this all the time in our daily lives. Just the same, I can still be me and participate in an experiment. My identity doesn't collapse into “only subject” when I'm studied, and the same continuity of self applies to someone in the Chinese room. The role doesn't erase the person. Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a law. Applied too bluntly, it favors the easiest seeming explanation even when the phenomenon, like consciousness, is exactly the kind where every explanation comes with complexity, making "simplicity" a misleading standard. Occam's razor in social situations biases toward implicit social assumptions that smuggle their way into the conclusion without accounting for their contribution toward complexity. Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system? Nothing in the setup changes about who they are or what they're doing. Once we allow that kind of shifting interpretation, any conclusion about group sentience is dead before it begins.

vannevar 1y ago
>Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system? If one of the participants simply responds to queries from outside the room with their own thoughts, how does that show sentience for the dinner party as a system? No offense, but you are illustrating exactly the confusion I was referring to in my original comment. The tendency is to assume that the whole is as sentient as the parts, and in the case of human organizations, that is not true. I think the short explanation is that the human participation is highly constrained---the members are employing a very small subset of their human potential to play their limited role in the organization. And the communication rate between these "slivers of a human" is much lower than that between the components of a single human mind. So the emergent behavior of the system as a whole is much simpler than the operation of a single human mind.