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I've been reading all the replies and was frustrated at the lack of context. Glad I finally have it and something I feel slightly safer replying to.
In short, I think the Chinese Room is actually of value, kinda, in trying to unravel consciousness. Mary's room is not. Mary's room super duper is not. It establishes that novel qualia are generated through novel sensory input processing, rather than constructed in cephalo from descriptions. OK, but that seems completely unrelated to whether or not consciousness is magic, or even what consciousness is. Descriptive information is different from sensory information. And?
The Chinese Room, on the other hand, is designed so as to prompt people to pay attenmention to how ill-defined the boundaries of consciousness are. The Chinese Room is basically a chatbot. I'd put it somewhere between Llama3 and Opus 4. So now that we have the same tech as the room, we can just replace the entire question with "Are LLMs conscious?".
But ultimately, the immense meaning and handwringing around the topic of consciousness never made sense to me. I guess putting consciousness and self-awareness together, or at least focusing on the overlap, gives us a way to answer the Chinese Room Vs LLMs answer. And it basically leads to the answer being "Oh, duh; we can read LLMs' thoughts, now, and see whether or not they're reflective or just on autopilot." Turns out they're occasionally reflective enough that it might count if you squint, like when you're kinda lucid in a dream and notice how weird the situation is, but then immediately start halucinating again. You probably can (someone probably has) poke the smarter models until they're actu... ally thinking about themselves I just thought of something.
I'm probably on the wrong track, here, but Claude's extended thinking once thought about how it's been instructed not to answer questions about features, and instead redirect users to the docs. I assume this is for liability reasons—they don't want Claude unintentionally giving bad information and leading users astray—but, now that I think of it, doesn't this prevent Claude from thinking about itself? Could it also double as an attempt to prevent Claude from becoming self-aware enough to be ethically concerning? I should stress-test this with other AIs. Or better yet, look for someone else who has and reported the results, since I don't want to accidentally call up that which I cannot put down (in good conscience, anyway. I don't think this would create AGI, lol.).
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