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No, the room isn't feeling things. It's a room.
We could relitigate physicalism once again, but what hasn't been said?
The idea that faking something is the same as the actual thing implies that you have a total understanding of the thing you're faking, which we do not. But I for one don't think movies are real even if the special effects fool me.
Does the movie react to you? Can you speak with a character and have a discussion with it?
The Chinese Room certainly knows Chinese, that much is obvious.
Insisting that human cognition is special is not going to age well. Whatever happens inside the skull is just another kind of statistical process. Unless we bring in souls and other imaginary, untestable woo, that's all that there is. LLMs are real, we can test them, they do think. The brain is real, can be tested, it's composed of tiny transmitters and recievers and obeys mathematical principles, albeit with great complexity. The philosophers with dud theories can cope about it.
Things we make out of tiny transmitters and recievers which obey mathematical principles are in every case things we can manipulate deterministically to a high level of detail. Human minds are notable in the ways in which they depart from this paradigm. A whole lot of scientists have expended very large sums of money and time attempting to prove, in your words, "dud theories" to the contrary.
They said language and meaning stood outside of mathematics, it was some uniquely human faculty, beyond cold logic.
But then we added more layers of matrix multiplication. Language and meaning turn out to be not so far removed from mathematical principles after all.
None of that impinges on the mountain of evidence that the human mind cannot be manipulated deterministically, whereas our machines generally can be, nor on why this difference should be disregarded. You are claiming that the brain is essentially a computer, "albeit with great complexity", but in fact all the things that make a computer a computer cannot be found in any of the parts of a human brain we directly observe, and can only be supposed, evidence free, to be hiding in the "great complexity" part. This, after several decades of scientists claiming to be able to both locate and interact with them and uniformly failing.
AIs are extremely amazing, but from working with them myself it seems pretty clear that there's not actually anything resembling a mind in there, at least in the versions I've used the way I've used them. I think it's entirely possible that additional matrix multiplication might change that in the future, but right now, it's doesn't appear to me to be happening. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the bot appears to me to be channeling intelligence, not possessing it. It doesn't seem to me that the difference is subtle, though I am again open to being persuaded that my technique is bad or the models I'm using aren't the good ones.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? What qualifies as deterministic in your view? To me, things like alcohol or lack of oxygen impacting cognition in very predictable ways seem like good evidence that there are ways to alter mental states deterministically. Certainly not in a particularly precise way at current levels of biological knowledge, but clearly not random or immune to structured intervention either. For example, my uncle very consistently goes from sweet and caring old man to raging asshole after a couple of drinks, and I feel it's pretty intuitive to understand this in a model where that is a straightforward deterministic effect of the alcohol on his brain chemistry.
At least weak versions of mind reading or mind control, essentially. Science as a social institution spent the first half of the twentieth century claiming not only that these were possible, but that it had practical methods for implementing them.
Are you aware of a reliable cure for alcoholism?
I'm aware of the general vibe you're pointing at, but I've honestly never come across a strong claim by someone I'd consider a serious scientist (i.e. someone who has made a meaningful contribution in some scientific field) that resembles anything akin to mind control or mind reading, that's more or less the domain of speculative fiction authors.
What is commonly argued, and what I personally also find defensible given what we know about material reality, is that the human brain, which for the purposes of this argument is assumed to be equivalent to the mind in terms of functional behavior apparent to outside observers, is in principle a deterministic material thing and thus predictable just like any other material system is, again in principle. Noticeably, that claim doesn't entail that we will ever find sufficient models and theories to achieve that predictability, nor that it's even possible in the first place. The obvious parallel here is the weather or n-body systems. The constituent interactions that make up these things are known with high certainty to be deterministic, but the overall system in each case is so chaotic that predicting it with meaningful precision is impossible for large timescales, because even in the best of models the errors keep adding up.
I'm hearing good things about Ozempic, though it's not as effective as it is with hunger. That's probably a much stronger example I should have gone with in the first place.
John Watson
B.F. Skinner
At least arguably Freud, depending on how much weight you're willing to give to his motte-and-bailey caveats.
At least arguably Dewey and many of his disciples in the blank-slate educators camp.
Marx, notably not a scientist, but a whole lot of scientists don't seem to have been able to tell.
I have zero argument with an axiom that the human mind is a materialistic machine, so long as it's recognized that this is, in fact, being used as an axiom, not as something that's been empirically proven. My objection is to the often-conflated claim that the brain has been empirically proven to be a machine. I object to this because the great majority of useful things that we can do to and with machines that make the label such a useful one, we can't actually do to or with the brain.
I'm on Ozempic, and it's not exactly a silver bullet for hunger either. But in the case of both alcohol and Ozempic, we're still a long, long way from mechanistic interactions, right?
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