Chinese room and Mary

Question 1

Chinese room (Searle)

Answer 1

You as a Turing machine. Shows that computers don’t have phenomenological consciousness. From the outside you are perceived as fluent Chinese speaker, whereas you don’t understand the language but just have a book with rules to reply. (passes the Turing test but falsely)

Question 2

Mary the color scientist (Jackson)

Answer 2

Mary is in a black and white room and gets all the information there is when it comes to perceiving the world. On paper she knows everything, but if she’s aloud outside the room and see it, will she learn something new? If yes, the knowledge is incomplete, so there’s something more than just that.

Question 3

Zombie thought experiment

Answer 3

The idea we can’t reduce consciousness to functionalism. We can imagine a world just like ours but w zombies. Clones of us, that are unable to feel/perceive ie qualia. No phenomenological consciousness. The fact we can imagine this creates the hard problem

Question 4

Self-monitoring (Block)

Answer 4

Added third part of consciousness. We perceive ourselves and our actions, errors we make etc. We’re constantly monitoring our own behaviour and weigh past experience against current evidence. We can distinguish self generated vs external representations. Just the previous two types don’t lead to consciousness without self-monitoring.