> As Searle showed with the Chinese Room, behavioral equivalence is not enough.
The Chinese Room experiment doesn't show only that. It also shows how important is the inter-relationship that exists between the component parts of a system.
We're reducing the Chinese Room to the Chinese and the objects they are using such as a lookup table. But what we're missing is the complex pattern between the answers, the structure and mutual integration that exists in their web of relations.
If we could reduce a system to its parts our brains would be just a bag of neurons, not a complex network. We'd get to the conclusion that brains can't possibly have consciousness on account that there is no "consciousness neuron" to be found in there. But consciousness emerges from the inter-relations of neurons and the Chinese Room can understand Chinese on account of its complex inner structure which models the complexity of the language itself.
The Chinese Room experiment doesn't show only that. It also shows how important is the inter-relationship that exists between the component parts of a system.
We're reducing the Chinese Room to the Chinese and the objects they are using such as a lookup table. But what we're missing is the complex pattern between the answers, the structure and mutual integration that exists in their web of relations.
If we could reduce a system to its parts our brains would be just a bag of neurons, not a complex network. We'd get to the conclusion that brains can't possibly have consciousness on account that there is no "consciousness neuron" to be found in there. But consciousness emerges from the inter-relations of neurons and the Chinese Room can understand Chinese on account of its complex inner structure which models the complexity of the language itself.