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"Yes," except that the scale of the assemblage would have to be unimaginably enormous. Then, in order to continue working at that scale, it would have to incorporate copious error correcting and fail over. It would need mechanisms to reset and reload marbles, and a source of energy to raise them. The system for distribution of that energy would itself be complex...

My point is that the Chinese Room argument is disingenuous. It oversimplifies the problem and asks for your incredulity that the oversimplified solution could answer the unsimplified problem.



The specific bug the Chinese Room suffers from is its old and back then we'd have conversational AI next week so obviously it seemed a good example at the time of a non-trivial task that only conscious beings can perform.

A re-stating of it in modern terms using modern skills would be that surely only conscious beings can invent and operate under Calculus rules. In fact its pretty hard to do and somewhat elitist in that only a small fraction of primates can learn calculus, larger than who know it now, but it'll never be 100%.

So... Mathematica and Maple are decent computer algebraic systems. Better than most conscious beings, even. Well, OK someone programmed them. So fine how about Coq the theorem prover?

Now the ancient Chinese Room argument extended to the modern computer is assume we have no access to the engineering department who created Mathematica because its 500 years from now or just the sake of argument or whatever. In fact assume the philosopher barely understands the concept of boolean logic much less floating point or algorithms. Then ask a philosopher which specific transistor in the CPU is the one that "understands" the calculus chain rule. What part of the hardware is the mathematica "for loop" construct as opposed to does the "for loop" construct? How much silicon and plastic does it take to think about Calculus? Observationally a lot less than it takes to do natural language conversational Chinese but why and how much and now it does not take a soul or disembodied spirit thingie to do Calculus and when did that change and when will it change for natural language conversational Chinese?

Or heres some fun, when will technology advance enough such that self awareness and self authored demands for political autonomy no longer require soul spirit thingies and are just great piles of fast logic gates?




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