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When I say "experience," I mean a sufficient grounding of certainty about what a word means, which includes how it's used, how it relates to the world that I'm experiencing, but al…

Can you expand on this? The thought experiment is just about showing that there is more to having a mind than having a program. It’s not an argument about the capabilities of LLMs …

"Actual understanding" means you have a grounding for the word down to conscious experience and you have a sense of certainty about its associations. I don't understand "sweetness"…

I’m with you 98% of the way and then things take a sharp turn. In your world, the mere behavior determines the understanding. In Searle’s the CAUSES of the behavior determine the u…

@Kim_Bruning The point of the experiment is that there is some opaque boundary where the behavior is indistinguishable--that's the empirical stance of behaviorists, what goes on in…

lol. Imagine a husband arguing to his wife: if you can't tell that I'm cheating on you, what's the point of the distinction of faithful vs. not?

As I've argued elsewhere, we should care what the source of the behavior is. The reason expand ethical concern to dogs and birds even though they don't have the capability to use l…

Ok, things are getting a little heated and personal so I'll attempt to engage one more time in good faith. The premise of the argument is that the Chinese Room passes the Turing Te…

Your vocabulary presupposes the categories you’re asserting are equivalent. The process of evolution and AI training are vastly different. One confers a survival advantage and is s…

Again, it’s not an epistemological test. In reality the material difference between a computing machine and a brain is trivial. It’s showing there’s a categorical difference betwee…

That's not the entire point, but it is the a big part of the premise. The entire point, on the contrary, is that the system inside the room does not have anything with conscious un…

The argument doesn’t have to go that far. I think most people have the intuitive, ha, understanding that “understanding” is grounded in some kind of conscious certainty that words …

He’s not arguing that it’s not possible to devise such a test. He’s saying, lay out the features of consciousness as we understand them, look for what causes them in the brain, loo…

First point: if you imagine that the brain is doing something like collapsing the quantum wavefunction, wouldn't you say that this is a functionally relevant difference in addition…

I would encourage deeply digging into the intuition that brain states and computer states are the same. Start with what you know, and then work backwards and see whether you still …

Searle has written responses to dozens of replies to the Chinese Room. It's likely that you can find his rebuttals to your objection in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's en…

I’m curious how finance teams actually work around these--surely many of them actually do use Stripe effectively?

A while back when I noticed that many upscale gyms were offering high-calorie workout smoothies, shakes and bars. When I did the math, it happened that most of them would completel…

I think as a culture we've gotten far too comfortable being complicit in casual corruption, rationalizing that "it's just the way things are." We should remind ourselves that it do…

I'd challenge this assumption. ChatGPT is supposed to convey information and answer questions in a manner that is intelligible to humans. It doesn't mean it should write indistingu…

I appreciate the helpful links, and I do have training in physics so the sense in which information is described in physics is not lost on me (it's essential to even 19th century t…

I just want to flag that assuming that humans and other animals are conscious because they have brains is not superstition in the same way that inferring consciousness from behavio…

Your friends (and animals) have brains, which produce consciousness, which you take for granted when you interact with them. That’s not a superstition. Can you say more about “a co…