carsonmcneil

Aristotle scooped you, this is an og fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(fallacy)

(But this is an excellent essay and I love it)

Well, there's the fact that people have lots of seizures, which as far as we can tell are very chaotic patterns of electrical activity that scramble all information contained in ongoing oscillatory patterns. (Note the failure of spike sorting algorithms upon recruitment of neurons into seizure activity. http://m.brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/07/17/brain.awv208.abstract) Not only that, but TMS (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation -- effectively introducing large random currents in large chunks of brain tissue) do... (read more)

Hm, I have a lot problems with Searle's argument. But even if you skip over all of the little issues, such as "The Turing Test is not a reasonable test of conscious experience", I think his biggest flaw is this assumption:

The intuition that the Chinese room follows a purely syntactic (symbol-manipulating) process rather than a semantic (understanding) one is a correct philosophical judgement.

If you begin with the theory that consciousness arises from information theoretical properties of a computation(such as Koch and Tononi's Integrated Info... (read more)