# What is Consciousness and can it be preserved? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 16, 2013, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105 "2013-06-16T03:09:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/81 "2013-06-19T16:05:22Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Yes, this is the ‘systems reply’, and it’s a very popular strategy to rebuke Searle’s argument. Against this, Searle has proposed that the man could then just ‘incorporate’ all the parts of the system—learn the rules by heart, do the manipulations internally, and so on. Of course, this is practically impossible, but that doesn’t rob the argument of its force—Searle only needs to establish that if there were a man capable of executing the program in this manner, he still wouldn’t understand Chinese. (It’s perhaps a little easier to swallow with the ‘paper machine’ chess player above.) > > I think here is a possibility for a response: if the man consciously implements the program as a whole, then expecting him to understand Chinese is really a level confusion—the ‘understanding’ does not happen on the level of the program’s execution, but on a higher level emergent from that. If he consciously implements a program that gives rise to a mind, then his mind would be different from the mind that he ‘simulates’, and thus, one should not wonder that he fails to understand Chinese. But while this argument may serve to somewhat weaken Searle’s, the underlying question—how to get semantics from syntax—is not touched at all; in order to make this argument, one needs to assume that it’s somehow possible. There are plausibility arguments for this, or for the more general idea that the brain can be replaced by a computational structure and still give rise to a mind—Chalmers’ fading and dancing qualia arguments, notably—but at least I have never seen any argument purporting to establish an actual procedure how to solve this difficulty. What does it mean to understand Chinese? The man, to an external observer, does. He can respond to appropriate Chinese input with appropriate Chinese output. Now it is claimed that internally he does not understand Chinese. But that is just shrinking the man before to some sort of ability within the man, and shrinking the system into the man’s brain. No difference in concept. It is just like if you implemented your computer version of the Chinese understanding program in hardware or firmware, so there is no “program” to be found. Really the same situation. Now we have abandoned the idea that you can get semantics purely from syntax a long time ago, and there are all sorts of syntactically correct but semantically nonsensical examples. So if he was trying to demonstrate this, no one will argue. It probably was an issue back then. I’ve written lots of parsers in my life, all for languages trivial compared to these examples, but even there the syntax/semantics distinction is clear in the code and even in the parser generator. I’m not sure I get the point of the chess example. When Turing wrote, someone using a program to play chess, implemented by whatever means, might have been confused with knowing how to play. I think few people make that mistake today, since most of us have used programs to extend our capability. I’m terrible at doing integration, and when I use Mathematica to solve an integral for me I do not suddenly think I have learned how to integrate. Today we distinguish knowing how to do something and knowing how to use a program which does something. > [@](#): > > This may be an issue of terminology—in philosophy, implementation is generally the relation between a physical computing system and that which it computes (cf. Chalmers’ paper _On Implementing a Computation_, which discusses a way to rebuke the allegations of triviality raised by Searle (and Putnam) against this relation, that is, the argument that any physical system can be seen to implement any computation whatsoever). What do they mean by “physical system?” To get a patent on what is essentially an algorithm, you describe its implementation on a computer as a physical system, since you can patent hardware that implements something. But there is a big difference between a purely physical system that has the capability of running any program and the specific instance of it containing instructions. Things have gotten even more complicated, since hardware design languages look like software, and FPGAs can be programmed in hardware terms to implement a function. I’ll have to find time to read these things, but I have this sneaking suspicion that both sides might misunderstand computation at a fundamental level. There is really no difference between hardware and software. Any program can theoretically be executed by hand with only paper and pencil. Similarly, any program can be implemented in hardware. Even the implementation of an instruction set can be all hardware, a combination of simple hardware and microcode, or all software, in a simulator. I’m interested in whether they grasp this. > [@](#): > > As I said above, this strikes me as rather more similar to the line you seem to be taken: a simple program does not produce understanding, but make it complex enough—by whatever means—and suddenly, it does. But as I said, I think this misunderstands Searle’s argument, which is wholly independent of the specific kind and realization of program used. Not at all - complexity in itself does not produce understanding. The understanding comes from someone with understanding who lends it to the program, or someone who understands understanding at a meta-level, who can program the computer how to learn Chinese in a similar way to how humans learn Chinese. These programs may be complex, but that is just a side effect of the problem. Complexity itself does not create understanding. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/82 "2013-06-19T16:12:43Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > I don’t think backing up a brain is sufficient for preserving “you”. I think your body plays a big, big role. We already know that screwing around with hormones in medication can seriously screw with people’s heads (see some of Una’s posts in recent trans threads about how some people might switch sexuality after/while taking hormone treatments). Obviously if I lop off your arm, you’re still meaningfully “you” (unless you die from blood loss), but it seems a lot more complicated than **just** your brain. > > It’s messy, I mean, castrating somebody will mess up their hormones a bit, but even if their personality has changed a little it’s still clearly “them” (or perhaps a better/less gruesome example is the hormonal shifts during pregnancy). I mean, I’m willing to be proven wrong, maybe a brain in a jar would just end up acting like a person with muted emotions – but I suspect that the person will be nigh unrecognizable if you simultaneously remove every piece of the endocrine system not in the brain (especially in addition to removing or radically altering things like muscle memory and sensory input depending on the apparatus used for this experiment). It is not clear what “you” means. Would behavioral changes coming from outside of the brain result in another “you” just like the brain in the jar would be another “you?” Any simulation of a brain would have to include the same type of inputs the normal brain gets, and not just the obvious audio and video ones. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/83 "2013-06-19T16:17:37Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > You will always be you with or without you body and brain. You are eternal and you don’t need a body to be alive. Cite that isn’t another YouTube video of somebody talking? ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/84 "2013-06-19T16:33:26Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Cite that isn’t another YouTube video of somebody talking? That is how we humans communicate, what is wrong is talking. People pay thousands of dollars to listen to lectures in college. I think it is the subject you can’t handle. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/85 "2013-06-19T16:38:29Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > What does it mean to understand Chinese? The man, to an external observer, does. He can respond to appropriate Chinese input with appropriate Chinese output. Now it is claimed that internally he does not understand Chinese. Understanding Chinese just means grasping what a sentence in Chinese refers to in the real world, or what its equivalent is in a language that is already understood. It’s the analogue of ‘knowing chess’ in the ‘paper machine’ example. > [@](#): > > I’m not sure I get the point of the chess example. When Turing wrote, someone using a program to play chess, implemented by whatever means, might have been confused with knowing how to play. I think few people make that mistake today, But that’s the point of the whole exercise: the man implementing the paper machine, or the man in the Chinese room, or the Chinese room as a whole system, does not know how to play, or does not know Chinese. If you say it’s a mistake to think of implementing the paper machine program as knowing how to play, then it seems to me you should also hold that it’s a mistake to think of implementing the Chinese room process as understanding Chinese—the arguments are isomorphic in that regard. > [@](#): > > What do they mean by “physical system?” To get a patent on what is essentially an algorithm, you describe its implementation on a computer as a physical system, since you can patent hardware that implements something. But there is a big difference between a purely physical system that has the capability of running any program and the specific instance of it containing instructions. The instructions—realized, for example, as voltage patterns—are physical themselves, and thus part of the physical system. There’s no difference made between hardware and software; typically, philosophers might consider some abstract model of computation, like a finite-state automaton, and consider as an ‘implementation’ a mapping of the states of the FSA to some physical system. The question is, when is such a mapping possible? The naive answer obviously is ‘always’ (at least if the physical system has a state space of high enough cardinality), and hence, any physical system can be seen as implementing any computation. But it’s a little more complicated than that. > [@](#): > > Not at all - complexity in itself does not produce understanding. The understanding comes from someone with understanding who lends it to the program, or someone who understands understanding at a meta-level, who can program the computer how to learn Chinese in a similar way to how humans learn Chinese. But if that works, you can just take the resulting program, and port it to another machine, thus skipping the learning. But then, you can take that program, and implement it on a Chinese room. And then, you’re getting semantics from syntax: all the operator will ever do, no matter how you frame it, is to carry out syntactic manipulations on strings of symbols; yet nevertheless, he can come somehow to understand what those symbols mean. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/86 "2013-06-19T16:39:44Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > That is how we humans communicate, what is wrong is talking. People pay thousands of dollars to listen to lectures in college. I think it is the subject you can’t handle. Give me your best cite for your claim, then. ---
**Author:** ![lekatt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lekatt/32/7269_2.png) [@lekatt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lekatt)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/87 "2013-06-19T18:58:48Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Give me your best cite for your claim, then. I think it would be self-evident. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/88 "2013-06-19T19:10:15Z")
> [@lekatt](#): > > I think it would be self-evident. How many times do I have to tell you-“Self Evident” does NOT mean “Evident only to one’s self”. ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/89 "2013-06-19T19:14:47Z")
> [@Half Man Half Wit](#): > > So it’s not murder if you don’t notice? . . . Well, technically, it’d be suicide. 😉 > [@Trinopus](#): > > Well, is it murder if no one notices…not even the victim…and, in fact, there is no test that can be applied to show that the murder happened? The victim is right here in the courtroom, testifying, “Yes, I’m the same guy. I have all the same memories and everything. See the little scar on my elbow from when my kitten scratched me when I was nine?” > > I’ve never found the “continuity of experience” argument convincing. I go into an elevator. … Or, you go to sleep. At least in the elevator, your consciousness is maintained through the transitions. But once consciousness stops, the continuity is disrupted, and [or so I say] only memory bridges the gap. > [@](#): > > I suggest that this pragmatic legal approach trumps philosophical idealism. I’m convinced that it’s true even ideally, philosophically … but it depends on what we define as “me”. Which is the question here, after all. > [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I think here is a possibility for a response: if the man consciously implements the program as a whole, then expecting him to understand Chinese is really a level confusion—the ‘understanding’ does not happen on the level of the program’s execution, but on a higher level emergent from that. If he consciously implements a program that gives rise to a mind, then his mind would be different from the mind that he ‘simulates’, and thus, one should not wonder that he fails to understand Chinese. Precisely what I was thinking (except I’d say “implements” rather than “simulates”). Serle limits himself to a single locus of consciousness in the man. IMHO, that unspoken limitation pinpoints what Serle misses in his own argument. > [@](#): > > But while this argument may serve to somewhat weaken Searle’s, the underlying question—how to get semantics from syntax—is not touched at all; in order to make this argument, one needs to assume that it’s somehow possible. There are plausibility arguments for this, or for the more general idea that the brain can be replaced by a computational structure and still give rise to a mind—Chalmers’ fading and dancing qualia arguments, notably—but at least I have never seen any argument purporting to establish an actual procedure how to solve this difficulty. Right. My prediction is that eventually, we’ll simply do it, and people will have to get used to treating mechanical beings as conscious, and eventually only zealots and philosophers will argue it. Of course, when we do finally do it, it’ll open some serious ethical worm cans! “I Robot” scratches the surface. ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/90 "2013-06-19T19:16:26Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > How many times do I have to tell you-“Self Evident” does NOT mean “Evident only to one’s self”. Please don’t feed the trolls. Lekatt is free to make arguments. If he or she just sticks to baseless claims, well, we can ignore them pretty easily. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/91 "2013-06-19T20:02:43Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Understanding Chinese just means grasping what a sentence in Chinese refers to in the real world, or what its equivalent is in a language that is already understood. It’s the analogue of ‘knowing chess’ in the ‘paper machine’ example. > > But that’s the point of the whole exercise: the man implementing the paper machine, or the man in the Chinese room, or the Chinese room as a whole system, does not know how to play, or does not know Chinese. If you say it’s a mistake to think of implementing the paper machine program as knowing how to play, then it seems to me you should also hold that it’s a mistake to think of implementing the Chinese room process as understanding Chinese—the arguments are isomorphic in that regard. > > The instructions—realized, for example, as voltage patterns—are physical themselves, and thus part of the physical system. There’s no difference made between hardware and software; typically, philosophers might consider some > abstract model of computation, like a finite-state automaton, and consider as an ‘implementation’ a mapping of the states of the FSA to some physical system. The question is, when is such a mapping possible? The naive answer obviously is ‘always’ (at least if the physical system has a state space of high enough cardinality), and hence, any physical system can be seen as implementing any computation. But it’s a little more complicated than that. > > But if that works, you can just take the resulting program, and port it to another machine, thus skipping the learning. But then, you can take that program, and implement it on a Chinese room. And then, you’re getting semantics from syntax: all the operator will ever do, no matter how you frame it, is to carry out syntactic manipulations on strings of symbols; yet nevertheless, he can come somehow to understand what those symbols mean. The bottom line here is that at any level where something is understood you can find structure where it is not. A dead brain - without working electrical impulses - understands nothing. A neuron understands nothing. Even some sections of a working brain don’t understand. A baby doesn’t understand Chinese - not even a Chinese one. He’s saying that it doesn’t matter if the room understands Chinese because a component of the room does not. In the original model, the person could be easily replaced by a dumb robot which recognizes a card and which pulls out the appropriate responding one. Works just as well, but then there isn’t the shock that the human does not understand Chinese. FSAs are much too simplistic to perform any computation - they cannot even simulate a Turing machine. No tape. And while a program is a physical representation, a process is a series of states over time, and is not a static representation that a program is. If the program is implemented in hardware, you still don’t have much until you have a hardware process which changes state over time, just like a traditional program does. I’m not sure I buy that you can implement anything in a state machine with any bounded cardinality. If you could, I think you would be able to solve the halting problem - which is impossible. But I’d have to think about this more. That you can port your program to another computer just shows that the entire system, software and hardware, is what is important. If you implemented an equivalent computer within the Chinese room and ported your program there, same thing. But you can’t port this program to the original Chinese room. The only way for the original room to pass the test is to have it be a simulation (brute force) of a person who understands Chinese by providing the proper response for every possible state. As you noted, probably impossible, and in any case not the way anything interesting to examine works. It is like having a computer which doesn’t execute any programs but rather has a table of all possible program/input combinations, and outputs the proper response. Such a computer, which is of course impossible, in now way invalidates my claim that syntax does not imply semantics, since the semantics are encoded in the syntax. Anyhow lex and yacc would barf at the amount of lookahead you’d need. ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/92 "2013-06-19T21:05:56Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > The big problem with the Chinese Room is that it has no state in it. It is a complex mapping from input to output, with no learning possible. Perhaps you’re discussing a different version than the one described in the Wikipedia article, which says > [@wiki](#): > > Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. So, the state/statelessness and FSA discussion is beside the point of the Chinese Room argument, as presented by Wikipedia. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/93 "2013-06-19T21:32:04Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > The bottom line here is that at any level where something is understood you can find structure where it is not. Well, the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any level on which there is understanding. You seem to be on board with this in the chess case: merely implementing the program does not constitute knowledge of chess playing. What’s different in the case of understanding Chinese? > [@](#): > > FSAs are much too simplistic to perform any computation - they cannot even simulate a Turing machine. True, but then, we don’t have any Turing machines in the real world, either, since we only ever have access to finite resources—thus, the computations we can implement are exactly those that can be carried out by FSAs. > [@](#): > > I’m not sure I buy that you can implement anything in a state machine with any bounded cardinality. If you could, I think you would be able to solve the halting problem - which is impossible. The halting problem for FSAs is always solvable, since you have only finitely many possible states to run through; either the machine halts at some point, or it repeats. > [@](#): > > That you can port your program to another computer just shows that the entire system, software and hardware, is what is important. If you implemented an equivalent computer within the Chinese room and ported your program there, same thing. But you can’t port this program to the original Chinese room. > The only way for the original room to pass the test is to have it be a simulation (brute force) of a person who understands Chinese by providing the proper response for every possible state. I think I don’t get what you’re trying to say here. Why would a simple input/output mapping be the only way for the original room to carry on a conversation? In fact, as I said, I think such a thing could be trivially circumvented: just ask it ‘what was the last thing I said?’, or something similar. The answer to this cannot be stored in a lookup table, it seems to me. And still, any program, any computation whatsoever can be implemented using the Chinese room, so if there is a computation that gives rise to understanding Chinese, then that, too, can be implemented. So, if we imagine that this implementation is taking place, what exactly now is it that understands Chinese? I think you agree with me in that it can’t be the man himself—he just sees strings of symbols, which he manipulates according to formal rules. So is it, then, the system itself? As I said, Searle anticipates this response and invites you to imagine the man himself incorporating the system, effectively carrying out the computations internally. In the chess case, you seem to agree with me that the analogous strategy does not give rise to ‘knowing how to play chess’ within the man, but not in the Chinese room case (and as I said, I have doubts about this myself). But consider for a moment just how bizarre the ‘systems’-reply ultimately is: you’re ascribing understanding, a mind, to a collection of things—a room, a person, a set of cards, a rule book, perhaps some scrap paper, and so on. What would it be like to be such an entity? Is there some form of self-consciousness, a knowledge to the effect of ‘I am a room with a man with a book with some cards, etc.’? If not, how is the room to understand, for instance, references to it by its interrogators? And what other phenomenology is associated with it? I think these are not easy questions, and the question of how manipulating symbols is supposed to give rise to understanding is the hardest of all. You seem to think differently—perhaps you see something I don’t. But IMHO, your replies so far miss the thrust of the argument: you keep coming back to issues of implementation, of hardware and software, of lookup tables and so on. But all of these things are completely irrelevant. The question is simply: is there a program that gives rise to understanding of Chinese? If so, when implemented on a Chinese room, what exactly is it that understands? Where is the understanding? Where is perception in Leibniz’ Mill? And couldn’t you imagine an exact physical duplicate of the Chinese room, in which there is no understanding—in which every symbol-string is produced simply through a causal chain from the input string? But if that’s possible, what is it that gives rise to understanding in one Chinese room, but not in its exact physical duplicate? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/94 "2013-06-19T22:16:13Z")
> [@Learjeff](#): > > Perhaps you’re discussing a different version than the one described in the Wikipedia article, which says > > So, the state/statelessness and FSA discussion is beside the point of the Chinese Room argument, as presented by Wikipedia. The versions I read of were stateless, but we all agree that these are impractical, so I’m not surprised he added this. But if the room emulates a computer, then you can only conclude that the room doesn’t understand if you start with the assumption that no computer can understand. If any computer and program can, you can emulate it with the room. The guy is just the dumb cpu and irrelevant. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/95 "2013-06-19T22:28:02Z")
> [@](#): > > And couldn’t you imagine an exact physical duplicate of the Chinese room, in which there is no understanding—in which every symbol-string is produced simply through a causal chain from the input string? But if that’s possible, what is it that gives rise to understanding in one Chinese room, but not in its exact physical duplicate? Walks like a duck, 's a duck. P-zombies are an utter absurdity. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/96 "2013-06-19T22:56:07Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Well, the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any level on which there is understanding. You seem to be on board with this in the chess case: merely implementing the program does not constitute knowledge of chess playing. What’s different in the case of understanding Chinese? Implementing as in running - no. Implementing as in writing - yes. You cannot write a chess program without knowing how to play chess. The chess program may do better at it than you, but you need to encode the rules. > [@](#): > > True, but then, we don’t have any Turing machines in the real world, either, since we only ever have access to finite resources—thus, the computations we can implement are exactly those that can be carried out by FSAs. > > The halting problem for FSAs is always solvable, since you have only finitely many possible states to run through; either the machine halts at some point, or it repeats. I will happily concede that FSAs can’t understand Chinese. I might be wrong, but no one is doing AI with FSAs. > [@](#): > > I think I don’t get what you’re trying to say here. Why would a simple input/output mapping be the only way for the original room to carry on a conversation? In fact, as I said, I think such a thing could be trivially circumvented: just ask it ‘what was the last thing I said?’, or something similar. The answer to this cannot be stored in a lookup table, it seems to me. It could be if all possible questions were stored, but by original room I meant one with only a lookup table. No argument with this not being able to work. > [@](#): > > And still, any program, any computation whatsoever can be implemented using the Chinese room, so if there is a computation that gives rise to understanding Chinese, then that, too, can be implemented. So, if we imagine that this implementation is taking place, what exactly now is it that understands Chinese? I think you agree with me in that it can’t be the man himself—he just sees strings of symbols, which he manipulates according to formal rules. So is it, then, the system itself? Exactly. The man is the cpu, which does not understand. > [@](#): > > As I said, Searle anticipates this response and invites you to imagine the man himself incorporating the system, effectively carrying out the computations internally. In the chess case, you seem to agree with me that the analogous strategy does not give rise to ‘knowing how to play chess’ within the man, but not in the Chinese room case (and as I said, I have doubts about this myself). A few problems with this. to continue with the CPU analogy, there is the concept of microcode, which consists of simpler instructions operating on bare machine resources which implements the normal instruction set of a machine. I worked on this for my PhD. While the CPU in the normal case is dumb, you could microprogram the CPU to “understand” Chinese if you can program the computer to understand Chinese. Applied to the person, what does “understanding” mean. Since we cannot see within our minds, we don’t know for sure that our actual understanding of Chinese isn’t implemented in this way at a level below the conscious. How would he propose preventing the person from abstracting the instructions into an actual understanding? Our subconscious understands lots of stuff - mine knows how to program quite well - so he could understand it without knowing he did. Chess is even clearer. If the instructions are just a series of moves, he is no more than a robot and doesn’t understand it paper or no paper. But when we learn chess at an early age, we are programmed with legal moves. That is understanding chess - not being good at it, but understanding it. And it is odd to claim that programs which can beat grandmasters don’t understand chess. They understand it in a different way from humans, but they can describe why they made certain moves better than humans can. > [@](#): > > But consider for a moment just how bizarre the ‘systems’-reply ultimately is: you’re ascribing understanding, a mind, to a collection of things—a room, a person, a set of cards, a rule book, perhaps some scrap paper, and so on. What would it be like to be such an entity? Is there some form of self-consciousness, a knowledge to the effect of ‘I am a room with a man with a book with some cards, etc.’? If not, how is the room to understand, for instance, references to it by its interrogators? And what other phenomenology is associated with it? But our mind is exactly a collection of things - neurons in our case - and programming in the form of learning. No, the room will not be able to be self conscious in the way you describe, but it is not programmed that way. We have evolved it. My old border collie was not conscious - he failed the mirror test - but he could learn, he could anticipate, and he could even abstract. Our subconscious minds can solve all sorts of problems without visibility into how we solve them. > [@](#): > > I think these are not easy questions, and the question of how manipulating symbols is supposed to give rise to understanding is the hardest of all. You seem to think differently—perhaps you see something I don’t. But IMHO, your replies so far miss the thrust of the argument: you keep coming back to issues of implementation, of hardware and software, of lookup tables and so on. But all of these things are completely irrelevant. He is assuming that the room can be made to look like it understands. If it cannot, there is no problem. If it can, then he seems to think the implementation matters, because he is concerned about the person. His main problem seems to be in accepting that you can have a room that understands with a person who does not as a component. Or a person who understands with some sort of core which does not. > [@](#): > > The question is simply: is there a program that gives rise to understanding of Chinese? If so, when implemented on a Chinese room, what exactly is it that understands? Where is the understanding? Where is perception in Leibniz’ Mill? And couldn’t you imagine an exact physical duplicate of the Chinese room, in which there is no understanding—in which every symbol-string is produced simply through a causal chain from the input string? But if that’s possible, what is it that gives rise to understanding in one Chinese room, but not in its exact physical duplicate? There is no such program yet - but my understanding of the purpose of this argument is that he is claiming there can be no such program. Refuting his argument does not prove there can be, of course - you need an existence proof for that. Since truly understanding Chinese involves a lot more than symbol manipulation, it is not an easy task and not one we know how to do yet. He kind of trivializes it by assuming that the paper and pencil method can understand Chinese. The big failure of AI has been to mostly work on things like “understanding” chess or “understanding” Chinese without working on what consciousness evolves. I’m not aware of work on program which self-examine, but this is what distinguishes our consciousness from my dog’s mind. To really work the Chinese room would have to answer questions about how it was feeling. If it could do that, in a consistent and believable way, would you consider it conscious - man or no? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/97 "2013-06-19T23:12:50Z")
Forgot all of this > [@](#): > > The question is simply: is there a program that gives rise to understanding of Chinese? If so, when implemented on a Chinese room, what exactly is it that understands? Where is the understanding? Where is perception in Leibniz’ Mill? And couldn’t you imagine an exact physical duplicate of the Chinese room, in which there is no understanding—in which every symbol-string is produced simply through a causal chain from the input string? But if that’s possible, what is it that gives rise to understanding in one Chinese room, but not in its exact physical duplicate? What do you mean by causal chain? A program is a causal chain. As far as we know the human understanding of Chinese is a causal chain. Or are you back to the cards? ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/98 "2013-06-19T23:47:03Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Implementing as in running - no. Implementing as in writing - yes. You cannot write a chess program without knowing how to play chess. The chess program may do better at it than you, but you need to encode the rules. . . . Real tricky question of interpretation. Knowing the rules doesn’t necessarily mean knowing “how to play the game.” (Even more subtle, knowing how to play the game doesn’t necessarily mean knowing the rules! You could have an “educable” program, that makes moves at random. When it makes an illegal move, it is punished. When it makes a legal move, it is rewarded. In time, it will make fewer and fewer illegal moves…but it doesn’t necessarily know the rules. It will have “modeled” the rules from observation. But what it has deduced might not be the actual rules. For instance, it might imagine that knights must move “two spaces orthogonally and then one space in a perpendicular direction.” Alternatively, it might imagine that “knights move one space orthogonally and one space diagonally.” These are accurate descriptions of the real rules…but these are not the real rules!) ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/99 "2013-06-19T23:47:27Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > But consider for a moment just how bizarre the ‘systems’-reply ultimately is: you’re ascribing understanding, a mind, to a collection of things—a room, a person, a set of cards, a rule book, perhaps some scrap paper, and so on. The wiki article gives an improvement of the “system” response: the “virtual” consciousness. A computer system creates lots of virtual things, like folders, documents, even virtual worlds you can (virtually) walk around in. The consciousness created by a program is a virtual one. Regarding the difference between a virtual thing and a real one, sometimes it matters (weather simulations) and sometimes it doesn’t: we don’t care that a desktop calculator is virtual, as long as it gives the correct results for calculations. My position would be that all consciousnesses are virtual. Your neurons don’t know they’re you, they’re just firing (or not) based on inputs. It’s the information processing that matters, not the substrate. Of course, we can’t prove that, at lest, not yet. > [@](#): > > What would it be like to be such an entity? Is there some form of self-consciousness, a knowledge to the effect of ‘I am a room with a man with a book with some cards, etc.’? If not, how is the room to understand, for instance, references to it by its interrogators? And what other phenomenology is associated with it? . As **Voyager** says, our minds are composites already. Not only do neurons not know they’re part of us, we don’t have any experience of neurons. The room would simply have interesting (or boring) conversations as a text stream. Or, in the model where computation is done in the room but inputs come from and are fed to a remote robot, the mind would tend to think that it’s wherever the robot happens to be. One of the classic philosophical arguments about whether consciousness is a physical thing regards its location. As far as we know, there’s no specific location for consciousness (other than it seems to co-reside with the brain). The argument is, it must not be physical if it doesn’t have a precise location. That argument flies in the face of physics, of course. I tried explaining that to the philosopy class full of people who weren’t science/engineering types and they didn’t buy it. Silly lit-types! Heck, we use imaginary numbers to correspond to physical phenomena. They didn’t get it. I admit I’m not conveying it here but I suspect y’all know what i’m talking about. In any case, if something is virtual, the location argument falls apart. It is what it is and interacts with whatever it interacts, wherever it does that, and it depends on (possibly distributed) physical hardware. But it’s not (just) the hardware. ---
**Author:** ![Learjeff](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/94ad74/32.png) [@Learjeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Learjeff)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2013, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105/100 "2013-06-19T23:53:43Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Real tricky question of interpretation. Knowing the rules doesn’t necessarily mean knowing “how to play the game.” Right; I was thinking the same thing. Another example: you could program a generic board-game learning machine that learns to play chess, without knowing that chess even exists. The location of the “background knowledge” is an interesting issue for the Chinese Room argument. Searle insists that the knowledge resides with the experts who codified the knowledge. But … heck, they all died. Where is that knowledge now? Oh, it’s no longer “knowledge” … so then, what _is_ it and how can it possibly work, so that the room can converse intelligently in Chinese? The Chinese Room argument is an interesting one, but Searle’s replies to all the criticism show that he’s really just arguing his preconceptions, and believes in some kind of somewhat magic hardware that can produce consciousness, which can’t be implemented digitally (because “digital machines can only do syntax, and syntax is not semantics”). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-consciousness-and-can-it-be-preserved/661105.md?page=6)