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The Chinese Room is a argument for solipsism disguised as a criticism of AGI.

It applies with equal force to apparent natural intelligences outside of the direct perceiver, and amounts to “consciousness is an internal subjective state, so we thus cannot conclude it exists based on externally-observed objective behavior”.



> It applies with equal force to apparent natural intelligences

In practice the force isn't equal though. It implies that there may be insufficient evidence to rule out the possibility that my family and the people that originally generated the lexicon on consciousness which I apply to my internal subjective state are all P-zombies, but I don't see anything in it which implied I should conclude these organisms with biochemical processes very similar to mine are equally unlikely to possess internal state similar to mine as a program running on silicon based hardware with a flair for the subset of human behaviour captured by ASCII continuations, and Searle certainly didn't. Beyond arguing that ability to accurately manipulate symbols according to a ruleset was orthogonal to cognisance of what they represented, he argued for human consciousness as an artefact of biochemical properties brains have in common and silicon based machines capable of symbol manipulation lack

In a Turing-style Test conducted in Chinese, I would certainly not be able to convince any Chinese speakers that I was a sentient being, whereas ChatGPT might well succeed. If they got to interact with me and the hardware ChatGPT outside the medium of remote ASCII I'm sure they would reverse their verdict on me and probably ChatGPT too. I would argue that - contra Turing - the latter conclusion wasn't less justified than the former, and was more likely correct, and I'm pretty sure Searle would agree.




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