Alas, if you refer to Searle's Chinese Room, that hasn't shown anything, if you just bite the bullet and accept that the Room is conscious.
> So, class, how might a strong AI proponent respond to this argument? Duh: you might not understand Chinese, but the rule book does! Or if you like, understanding Chinese is an emergent property of the system consisting of you and the rule book, in the same sense that understanding English is an emergent property of the neurons in your brain. Like many other thought experiments, the Chinese Room gets its mileage from a deceptive choice of imagery -- and more to the point, from ignoring computational complexity. We're invited to imagine someone pushing around slips of paper with zero understanding or insight -- much like the doofus freshmen who write (a+b)^2=a^2+b^2 on their math tests. But how many slips of paper are we talking about? How big would the rule book have to be, and how quickly would you have to consult it, to carry out an intelligent Chinese conversation in anything resembling real time? If each page of the rule book corresponded to one neuron of (say) Debbie's brain, then probably we'd be talking about a "rule book" at least the size of the Earth, its pages searchable by a swarm of robots traveling at close to the speed of light. When you put it that way, maybe it's not so hard to imagine that this enormous Chinese-speaking entity -- this dian nao -- that we've brought into being might have something we'd be prepared to call understanding or insight.
To my mind both dualism and biological naturalism are both positing some special woo needed for consciousness without saying what that woo is, or what it's like, or how it works, or anything about it at all.
Thats not quite the same thing, but if there is any distinction it’s a pretty darn fine one, and it certainly doesn’t exclude a Cartesian theatre interpretation.
Regular meat-and-bone people lose consciousness all the time, and regain it later. No big deal.
> What connects the next computational step they do to the previous one and the next...
Whatever index card system or similar the operating procedure in the room prescribes for keeping track of state?
> which then somehow gives rise to a fragment of qualia. That seems like an impossibly complex and unlikely scientific theory.
We don't have any 'scientific theory' of qualia. We don't even know if they exist, or how they would manifest in the physical world.
Since we don't know much of anything, I don't know whether a fragment of a figment would be more or less weird than the figment itself. Or whether we would even have fragments.
It's probably too early to try to have a theory of qualia that would apply here?
So what? There are lots of REAL physical processes that are disrupted in a human being when they lose consciousness.
The point of the Chinese Room is to show that information processing alone is insufficient for consciousness. For example is information processing happening when the person pauses for a minute - or not? For a second, for a millisecond? What about when the pen comes off the paper? What about when he's sharpening his pencil? How exactly does the consciousness=information processing idea work for these situations? It's a nonsense idea that doesn't hold up to careful inspection.
And it's exactly akin to saying we get nuclear power by simulating a nuclear power plant in a computer.
On the other hand, if we believe that consciousness is like an ordinary physical property of the universe, either emergent or fundamental, then it should be related to other physical properties, just as electromagnetism is to mass and energy.
You're missing the point. A bit is just some electrons. It could be a scribble in a notebook. But consciousness integrates several pieces of information into a coherent experience. The bits in an index card system could as well be some scratchings of graphite in a notebook. How would consciousness arise from graphite in a notebook?
> We don't have any 'scientific theory' of qualia. We don't even know if they exist,
I differ on this. The only thing I know for certain the universe contains is qualia. You, the idea there is a "me", atoms, bits, axons and electric potentials are merely ideas, which "I" apprehend as qualia.
> or how they would manifest in the physical world.
Correct, that is the question. But the Chinese room thought experiment shows it's not merely by information processing. I mean, atoms in a room are processing information - they are computing the next state of all of the atoms in the room. Are they conscious? How about a subset of those atoms? Are those conscious in a different way?
The point is that the consciousness-is-computation idea is just too weak to even be a physical theory.
The whole thing is a giant computation. Yet computations are as mundane (lifeless) as an abacus or pen and paper. It is just wrong to thing the abacus is conscious. Same for the room.
That's part of the sleight of hand employed in the argument, of reducing it to one person in a room with a table stacked with symbols in front of them. He's misdirecting our intuition with a trick of scale. If instead I said the "room" was the size of Jupiter, and it had a vast army of people manipulating the symbols, and each input and output took millions of years (or you speed up the rate of manipulation arbitrarily), all of a sudden it seems less implausible.
We can modify the thought experiment so that it's something internal to the persons brain. The person doesn't learn Chinese as most people do, but a computer rewires their mind to be the same as someone who did. Think of The Matrix, when Neo says "I know Kung Fu." Would people then say this person speaks Chinese? I imagine just about everyone would say yes.