>>11483775Bump to counter the sage
>>11483775No, books are not brains. A system that behaves like a brain is functionally the same as a brain. That's literally the definition of "functionally the same". And my opinion is that consciousness inherently depends on the function of a system.
The thought experiment is at best misleading, at worst deceptive, because it asks us to imagine the chinese room being some dude reading from a book, while in fact this would be nowhere near performant enough to do what the chinese room is supposed to be doing. He would at best spend years or decades calculating each word, or most likely fail to do so entirely because he would make human mistakes along the way. And either way, the person is beside the point because even if it could work, it doesn't matter that the person doesn't himself understand why he is outputting what he is, because what is supposed to understand it is the system as a whole, not every individual part of it.
If you were to construct a real chinese room, i.e a room that takes an input and gives the same output that a conscious, understanding person would, you would likely need something that is far more intuitively easy to compare to a brain, such as a computer running artificial intelligence software, or even an organic machine that mimics the brain not only in behavior, but in structure.
You might say "but that doesn't count, the idea is that it must be literally be a set of instructions, so that you can separate the understanding from the behavior". But artificial intelligence software, and, I posit, indeed our brains, IS just a set of instructions in the first place. It's an implementation of an algorithm. It's just that the algorithm is so incredibly complex that we cannot grasp it. Our understanding/consciousness emerges from that algorithm, and it would so in any other implementation of the same algorithm as well. The algorithm IS the understanding, there is no separating them.
