Comment by tasty_freeze

I think you are starting with the conclusion that human consciousness is somehow non-material and then concluding the chinese room system can't be conscious because it is just material.

The success of LLMs imitating human speech patterns, often better than most people (ask an LLM to write a poem about some topic in a certain style and it will do better than 99% of people and do it faster than 100% of people) is pretty impressive. "But it is just a thought-free statistical model, unlike people". I agree it is a thought-free statistical model.

But most of the things we all say in conversation is of the same quality. 99% of the time in conversation words tumble out of my mouth and I learn what I said when I hear my words in the same moment by conversation partner does. How is that any different from how today's LLM models behave? Is such dialog any more thoughtful than what LMMs produce?

The problem with the people who buy Searle's argument is they don't really think through the magnitude of what would really be required to pull it off. It wouldn't just be a static book, or a wall full of encyclopedias. It would have to be a stateful system that modifies that state and deduces new rules that affect future transformations as flexibly as the human mind does. To me it is clear that such a system really does think in the same way that humans do, no dualism required.