Chinese room argument

In Greg Egan's "Jewelhead" stories, every person gets a computer implanted in their brain at birth, which gradually learns to imitate the input-output behavior of the biological brain. At some point they switch to the jewel full time and throw away the biological brain, becoming immortal. That's seen as a fact of life and people don't question it much.

In one of Wei Dai's nightmare scenarios, we ask an AI to upload humans in an efficient way. Unfortunately, since humans can't introspect into the idea of "I'm conscious" very deeply, the resulting resource-optimized uploads just have a handful of hardcoded responses to questions about consciousness, and aren't in fact conscious. Nobody notices.

Of course, both cases are problematic only if you can "optimize" a human brain into something else, which would mimic the same input-output behavior without being conscious. The trouble is that we can't rule out that possibility today. Humans certainly have a lot of neural circuitry that's a side effect of something else. Some of it might get optimized out, the way a human in a sealed room can be optimized to nothing at all. To rule out a "Disneyland without children" scenario, wishful thinking isn't enough, we need to properly figure out consciousness and qualia.

  1) construct a hypothetical brain on an implausible substrate
  2) note the implausibility of the substrate
  3) therefore consciousness is magic QED

The fact that man does not understand Chinese is irrelevant, because it is only the system as a whole that matters. Searle notes that (in this simple version of the reply) the "system" is nothing more than a collection of ordinary physical objects; it grants the power of understanding and consciousness to "the conjunction of that person and bits of paper" without making any effort to explain how this pile of objects has become a conscious, thinking being. Searle argues that no reasonable person should be satisfied with the reply, unless they are "under the grip of an ideology".