The Chinese Room demonstrates that outward appearance of an understanding of meaning is by no means an actual indicator of understanding.
Bona fide understanding is a main feature of conscious thinking. If something is not conscious, it is not possible for it to understand.
What goes on inside the Chinese Room is an analog of programming. AI is
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Edit: The Chinese Room thought experiment already assumes that the Room passes the test 100%, yet it demonstrates how it does so without the faculty of understanding. The passing of the test is an indictment of the Chinese Room as a non-conscious mechanism under a mask of conscious appearance , and not some support of its conscious status.
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PS If u cannot imagine or understand something it does not mean that it does not exist.
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I could only assume that you're not talking about cyborgs.
The internet is a communication medium. It itself has as much or as little consciousness as any communication medium. Consciousness resides not on the medium itself but on the end users OF the medium. Let's say that there are millions of people communicating via paper mail- We can call it "Snailmailnet". The consciousness of snailmailnet resides on the people communicating via the mail, and not the mail itself.
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Likewise, humans are not to demonstrate consciousness to other humans. You are most likely a bot pretending to be human.
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However, that distinction is prima facie, under the condition that we do not know the origin of said p-zombie.
If we know a p-zombie to be a p-zombie, then its identity as a non-sentient thing would be established.
If we know, for example, that some thing is programmed instead of a result of a life process (e.g. birth, which instills native intelligence instead of artificial intelligence) then we would know that it is not sentient.
None of us would demonstrate such self-deception and other-deception as to knowingly mis-categorize, at least I hope not.
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Is there a reason you think that?
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There is another categorical difference, that of performance. I'm not thinking of the issue in terms of performance; I'm concerned whether x is either conscious or not conscious, and not whether x is somehow more or less powerful than y.
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1) the actuality that a computer could be sentient
2) a thought experiment that proves that something can seem intelligent while actually operating to a set of rules.
An implication if what you're saying is that as soon as we understand how the brain works to a sufficient level, humans will stop being sentient, because they will be (theoretically) deterministic.
what the chinese room does mean, is that we can't prove sentience, just as the brain in the jar means we can't prove the world is real. This means that we then have to take the fact that we are sentient and that the world is real on faith. By extension that everyone else is real is an act of faith.
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The Chinese Room is a demonstration against what is dubbed "strong AI" by Searle: http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/
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therefore any computer program that becomes sufficently complex will start to show signs of sentience.
Take the chinese room to a logical extent. we (outside observers) know that there is a person in that room, we also know that people can learn languages. Therefore it is not outside the realms of possibility that the person will learn written chinese, especially if they start playing around with the reaponses.
that's before we start getting into things like true ai programming, that uses analogues of brain nurons. these systems are trained not programmed, and are already showing sufficent complexity that we can't identify how they got to certain answers.
which brings us back to the brain in a jar, how can you prove that you're not just a computer
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