Nonetheless, he DID provoke the headline thoughts in me.
Expanded from three Tweets to him, here’s the stimulation and light bulbs I got.
First, here's what both Turing AND Searle (AND many AI friendly philosophers IMO) miss. We and other conscious entities in general are EMOTERS, not just thinkers. No WAY emotions act in a way to be run as a Chinese room experiment.
To riff on our mutual friend Massimo Pigliucci, as consciousness is in part definable as embodied cognition, we need to emphasize the “embodied.” We need to remember that stimuli that lead to emotional reactions come from external sensory perceptions as well as internal cogitation.
Related to that, as I have repeatedly said, our emotional depth and nuance, as well as second- third- and fourth-level theories of mind, is what distinguish us from a cow chewing the cud.
To put it in terms of the Chinese room? The “system” may be answering questions, but it’s not structured to have consciousness because the system as a whole, not just the person inside, is passive. It’s a plant, not an animal. (More on this in a part two.)
Second, the Chinese room is not like Turing OR real-world meatspace. The parameters of a closed vs. open system and related issues are different, plus what the specific intentionality is. Per Daniel C. Dennett, when your intuition pumps are reaching beyond good analogous ideas, you’ll pump out some funky stuff.
In this case, the intuition pumps miss the question of “is it like a plant” or “is it like an animal”? Plants do interact with their environments and do respond to them. They’re not conscious in any animalian sense and I still reject claims that they are.
Third, as for Dennett? His big miss on what you raise is looking at this similar to a black/white on/off conscious/unconscious switch, rather than a "slider" with various degrees of conscious/unconscious between 0 and 100. For guy who talked about "multiple drafts" it’s a bad oversight. But not a shocking one.
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