carsonmcneil

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) doesn't seem to produce any long term effects as long as you don't start actually causing tissue damage through hydrolysis.

On the molecular side, we know that our core personality is resilient to temporary flooding of the brain with a large array of different transmitter analogs, antagonists,... (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 Information Theory), then while you may reach some unintuitive conclusions, you certainly don't reach any contradiction, meaning that Searle's argument is not at all a sufficient disproof of AI's... (read more)