by strogonoff | 2025-10-13 11:11:41+00:00
There are two distinct counter-arguments to this way of debunking the Chinese room experiment, not in any specific order.

First, it is tempting to assume that a bunch of chemicals is the territory, that it somehow gives rise to consciousness, yet that claim is neither substantiated nor even scientific. It is a philosophical view called “monistic materialism” (or sometimes “naive materialism”), and perhaps the main reason this view is popular currently is that people uncritically adopt it following learning natural scientific fields, as if they made some sort of ground truth statements about the underlying reality.

The key to remember is that this is not a valid claim in the scope of natural sciences; this claim belongs to the larger philosophy (the branch often called metaphysics). It is not a useless claim, but within the framework of natural sciences it’s unfalsifiable and not even wrong. Logically, from scientific method’s standpoint, even if it was the other way around—something like in monistic idealism, where perception of time-space and material world is the interface to (map of) conscious landscape, which was the territory and the cause—you would have no way of proving or disproving this, just like you cannot prove or disprove the claim that consciousness arises from chemical processes. (E.g., if somebody incapacitates some part of you involved in cognition, and your feelings or ability to understand would change as a result, it’s pretty transparently an interaction between your mind and theirs, just with some extra steps, etc.)

The common alternatives to monistic materialism include Cartesian dualism (some of us know it from church) and monistic idealism (cf. Kant). The latter strikes me as the more elegant of the bunch, as it grants objective existence to the least amount of arbitrary entities compared to the other two.

It’s not to say that there’s one truly correct map, but just to warn against mistakenly trying to make a statement about objective truth, actual nature of reality, with scientific method as cover. Natural sciences do not make claims of truth or objective reality, they make experimentally falsifiable predictions and build flawed models that aid in creating more experimentally falsifiable predictions.

Second, what scientific method tries to build is a complete, formally correct and provable model of reality, there are some arguments that such model is impossible to create in principle. I.e., there will be some parts of the territory that are not covered by the map, and we might not know what those parts are, because this territory is not directly accessible to us: unlike a landmass we can explore in person, in this case all we have is maps, the perception of reality supplied by our mind, and said mind is, self-referentially, part of the very territory we are trying to model.

Therefore, it doesn’t strike me as a contradiction that a bunch of valves don’t understand yet we do. A bunch of valves, like an LLM, could mostly successfully mimic human responses, but the fact that this system mimics human responses is not an indication of it feeling and understanding like a human does, it’s simply evidence that it works as designed. There can be a very different territory that causes similar measurable human responses to arise in an actual human. That territory, unlike the valves, may not be fully measurable, and it can cause other effects that are not measurable (like feeling or understanding). Depending on the philosophical view you take, manipulating valves may not even be a viable way of achieving a system that understands; it has not been shown that biological equivalent of valves is what causes understanding, all we have shown is that those entities measurably change at the same time with some measurable behavior, which isn’t a causative relationship.