This is called functionalism. There was a joke about it on existential comics some time ago: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/357

I think that comic misses the point though. It mistakes "a thing that is in some superficial respects the same" for "a thing is in every externally observable respect the same".

So far as we know, consciousness does not exist as a physical thing. The behavior of a human is completely derivable, in principle, from natural law.

There is no physical test or manifestation of awareness.

So arguments about what can or can not be conscious have the same flavor as arguments aswhether there is or is not a God. It's unproveable!

Yet unlike God, most people do not deny the existence of consciousness, because of direct personal experience.

Consciousness is the "unproveable yet true" statement in the theoretical system that is the physical universe. Probably it haunts any physical system complex enough to host it.

> It mistakes "a thing that is in some superficial respects the same" for "a thing is in every externally observable respect the same

So does all this talk about computers being "the same" if they can, given access to sufficient human-generated inputs, produce similar strings of Chinese characters to those a conscious Chinese person might do.

If you're not stuck behind a WeChat prompts it's trivially externally observable that a big silicon box which outputs Chinese characters and an agglomeration of cells which walks, eats, makes funny faces and reproduces are dissimilar in most respects (the machine might generate a subset of human outputs which is consistently convincingly human-like, but it's trivially shown that it runs different operations on different hardware at a different speed, requires different inputs to function effectively, and it's highly probable it doesn't devote clock cycles to dreaming about the physical and hormonal release of mating with other computers.

Something which in every observable respect is the same as me isn't a computer, it's me (or perhaps a clone or twin). A computer which can produce text outputs indistinguishable from mine is a very impressive trick indeed, but trust me, my sister will spot the difference straight away when she tries to give it an EEG scan!

I do think you're on to something here: a lot of what we feel is embedded in our bodies.

So imagine we put your brain in a vat; we'll give you a webcam and a microphone for input, and for output -- ah, sorry, budget constraints, just an old printer. You visualize typing on a keyboard in your mind's eye and the characters are tapped out irl on a long scrolling sheet of paper.

Would you still feel? Would you still feel like you?

I'd guess yes and only sort of, respectively. Perhaps you wouldn't be as interested in sex (or maybe it would depend on what mix of hormones the vat was feeding you).

I think we can safely say your sister wouldn't immediately recognize you, though. But given some quality time QA, I think she's end up concluding you were still you, and more than just a parlor trick.

But what do you think? Is it you? If it is, it doesn't seem THAT different from the computer program you, does it?

This exactly. Thank you for putting into words why I always thought the Chinese Room though experiment was absolute garbage. If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same.

> If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same.

I think that suffers the same flaw as logical positivism: if my axioms can't find a difference, there isn't one, no way my assumptions are wrong. (Namely, my axiom is that external observations capture the entirety of reality, there is nothing subjective.)

If two people laugh at a joke, one faking and one actually finding it funny, what is the externally observable difference? Assume the faker has been trained in all manner of knowledge about what would make the joke funny, they just don't find it so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

The fake laugh can be observed to be different by the person faking it.

Exactly. And the person following the Chinese program also knows they don't speak Chinese and that they aren't understanding anything.

I don't really find the Chinese Room argument very compelling because there are too many "it's obvious that X can't really understand" in it.

Also, you can't derive from it that there can't be computed consciousness in some other form.

That feels off. It’s like me saying I don’t know English. I merely know the correct alghorithm to give the correct responses to things people give me as input.

There supposedly is a (semantic) process in your brain that makes you believe you understand the sentences you are reading and writing that is on top of the (symbolic) process that tells you what to say and how to say it. And that's the quid of the issue. Searle argues that symbolic computation cannot produce understanding at the semantic level.

It makes me thing about laughter yoga[1]. Just because you "fake" it doesn’t mean it won’t have a concrete measurable effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_yoga

That would also apply to the Chinese room.

So a tree falling in a forest with noone around to hear doesn't make a sound?

I always thought the point of the Chinese room argument was that the man inside doesn't understand Chinese, but the whole system definitely does?

Yes. The "system" understands Chinese in the same way a native speaker does. It's two different implementations (room system and native speaker) of the same computation ("understanding Chinese"). There is no externally observable difference between actually understanding Chinese and a perfect simulation of a system that understands Chinese. The fact that the person inside doesn't speak Chinese as a result is irrelevant in the same way that the L2 cache alone without the rest of a computer cannot run Minecraft is. If anything the Chinese Room thought experiment is an argument in favor of consciousness being computation. It pains me greatly that someone could come up with it and conclude the opposite.

The point of the experiment is to think about the individual in the room. You can not say it's irrelevant, because it's the entire point.

The system's response is trivial: Sure, if the room+person combination leads always to a coherent response in Chinese, then the entire system understands Chinese. I'd go even further: If the person in the room does not understand Chinese, but the system does, then there is some entity that understands Chinese - either a person or an advanced AI, feeding the inputs. Then, from the systems perspective, the person in the room is largely irrelevant.

But this is not the argument: Despite no discernible difference from the outside, the person in the room may either understand Chinese, or they may not. And so there is a distinction - from the perspective of the individual in the room, that does not depend on the outside observation.

That's all there is to it. It shows that meaning and understanding are not the same as syntactic computation (an important point, to be sure), but it does not show that one can exist with or without the other. By extension, it does not otherwise disprove consciousness as being this or that.

You might as well conclude that my fingers typing this post aren't conscious. It's a weird argument.

The analogy might be more valid if arguing its not possible for a third party to actually determine whether an entity/system is conscious (irrespective of whether the entity is conscious or not)

The argument about a third party is trivial in my opinion. Someone responds correctly in Chinese, and the onus just falls on that element of the system to be conscious or not. It's another argument and I don't even see how this experiment is particularly enlightening in that case. I think in that case, people just confuse it with the Turing test.

Instead, the core matter is about form versus meaning - something that is indeed not observable from the outside, and yet is a distinction to the person inside the Chinese room.

I think that's the argument for why the Chinese room is not a particularly illuminating thought experiment after all.

Edit: Or as fouronnes3 said in a sibling comment, why it's actually evidence against Searle's original argument.

I apply the same reasoning as you to consciousness for entities such as animals, whose biology is reasonably close to our own. I don’t think the same can be applied to software.

Cargo cults that developed in the Southwest Pacific after WWII reportedly attempted to emulate rituals performed by U.S. military personnel such as landing signals, believing they’ll bring back the aircraft that had been giving them gifts.

Similarly, believing that a program will possess consciousness if we provide it with some of its external manifestations seems backwards.

Of course, the problem is that we don’t know what consciousness is. Until we do, I’ll keep assuming we don’t have the proficiency to create it under such different conditions just yet.

Isn't consciousness just the ability to observe some part of the brain's processes and use it as another kind of sensory input to thinking?

It’s tough for me to define consciousness as “just” anything, but its indefinability is in fact the main part of the problem.

it occured to me once that those cargo cults could be parodying the US military personnel's deep addiction to things like guns, bombs and aircraft instead of being fully plugged/merged into nature.

"As good as" is not the same as "truly" though.