Chinese Room Argument

Intentionality Substrate Entity predictions Targets digital CF

Overview

A sufficiently large lookup table could replace any interaction with the target algorithm, while remaining input/output identical. However, it is a priori implausible that a lookup table, with its simple mechanics, could be conscious, no matter how vast it is.

The canonical example addresses 'understanding' rather than 'consciousness': A non-Chinese speaker inside a closed room uses a lookup table to identify fluent, convincing responses to Chinese sentences provided by an external Chinese speaker. The external person might think that the person inside 'understands' Chinese, but they do not. A common response is that understanding exists not in the lookup table or the operator's mind but somehow in the 'room as a system', e.g. the lookup table + mechanical sensor/operator. However, this response does not help the 'consciousness' critique, because all those elements remain as simple as the lookup table. Note that the original framing can be read as an argument against the Turing Test as a behavioural test of consciousness rather than an argument directly against CF, hence the change in emphasis in this presentation.

Responses

CF could be restricted to require a particular causal structure for the algorithm, rather than allowing any variants of the algorithm that merely have an identical input/output mapping.
Deny the intuition that large lookup tables would be 'too simple' to be conscious.
BUT: Need to motivate a threshold (even if gradual in nature) by which small non-conscious lookup tables would transition into large conscious lookup tables.
To accommodate all possible (infinite) language responses, the 'lookup table' must in fact be a different system, likely applying compression, generation, extrapolation, and other functions. Such advanced functions might plausibly compound into generating consciousness even if a lookup table would not.
BUT: This additional function needs motivating, because relatively simple combination rules may already be sufficient alongside a very large table to generate adequate linguistic complexity for any realistic conversation.
The computation did in fact happen and did generate conscious experiences, but only when the lookup table was created (i.e. a significantly more complex act than reading off the lookup table).
BUT: That means that there was only one conscious experience, contradicting the intuition that conscious experiences should be taking place during the conversations in question. Now we can just re-use the lookup table as often as we like but without generating any new moments of experience.

Overview

Responses

Further reading