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    The Chinese Room argument fails to discount the possibili... — Carmelics
    Home/Consciousness & Mind
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    The Chinese Room argument fails to discount the possibility of simultaneously existing disjoint mentalities

    Consciousness & Mind
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Parfit's reductionist account of persons entails that multiple simultaneous person-stages can instantiate distinct psychological continuities within one body.
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    • 2.If psychological continuity grounds mentality, the room-system and Searle can satisfy distinct continuity relations, yielding disjoint mentalities co-located in space.
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    • 3.Searle's argument assumes a single locus of mentality per physical system, an assumption Parfit's fission cases directly refute.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Functionalist multiple-realizability, as defended by Putnam, allows one physical substrate to simultaneously realize distinct functional organizations at non-overlapping levels of description.
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    • 2.Hofstadter's strange-loop account identifies minds with self-referential patterns that can emerge orthogonally within the same physical medium without mutual interference.
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    • 3.Therefore the room-as-system can instantiate a genuine semantic loop irreducible to, and disjoint from, Searle's first-person intentionality, defeating the argument's implicit uniqueness assumption.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The agent that understands Chinese could be distinct from the physical system (e.g., the person in the room)
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    • 2.A virtual mind implementing understanding may exist at a different level than the physical implementation
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    Topics

    Consciousness & Mind

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    Related

    A virtual mind implementing understanding may exist at a different level than th...Functionalist multiple-realizability, as defended by Putnam, allows one physical...Hofstadter's strange-loop account identifies minds with self-referential pattern...If psychological continuity grounds mentality, the room-system and Searle can sa...
    +4 moreShow less
    Parfit's reductionist account of persons entails that multiple simultaneous pers...Searle's argument assumes a single locus of mentality per physical system, an as...The agent that understands Chinese could be distinct from the physical system (e...Therefore the room-as-system can instantiate a genuine semantic loop irreducible...

    Similar

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    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: chinese-room
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    Minsky (1980) and Sloman and Croucher (1980) suggested a Virtual Mind reply when the Chinese Room argument first appeared. In his widely-read 1989 paper “Computation and Consciousness”, Tim Maudlin considers minimal physical systems that might implement a computational system running a program. His discussion revolves around his imaginary Olympia machine, a system of buckets that transfers water, implementing a Turing machine. Maudlin’s main target is the computationalists’ claim that such a mac
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit