The person in the room performing the lookup is a red-herring and can be replaced by suitable algorithm, e.g. a convnet - which could learn the lookup task.
Consciousness resides in the minds that created the lookup tables: they were constructed by conscious beings to map queries to meaningful responses.
The lookup tables are the very sophisticated part of Searle's Chinese Room.
The recent emergent semantic vector algebra discovered in human languages by Mikolov's word2vec [Mikolov et al] demonstrate that some of the computational power of language is inherent in the language ( but only meaningfully interpretable by
a conscious listener.
Meaning requires Consciousness but language is unexpectedly sophisticated and contains a semantic vector space which can answer simple queries ("What is the Capital of...") and analogise ("King is to What as Man is to Woman") algebraicly. [Mikolov et al]
This inherent semantic vector space is discoverable by context encoding large corpii.
Language is a very sophisticated and ancient tool that allows some reasoning to be performed by simple algebraic transformations inherent to the language.
-
[Mikolov et al] :
Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space
Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781
Consciousness resides in the minds that created the lookup tables: they were constructed by conscious beings to map queries to meaningful responses.
The lookup tables are the very sophisticated part of Searle's Chinese Room.
The recent emergent semantic vector algebra discovered in human languages by Mikolov's word2vec [Mikolov et al] demonstrate that some of the computational power of language is inherent in the language ( but only meaningfully interpretable by a conscious listener.
Meaning requires Consciousness but language is unexpectedly sophisticated and contains a semantic vector space which can answer simple queries ("What is the Capital of...") and analogise ("King is to What as Man is to Woman") algebraicly. [Mikolov et al]
This inherent semantic vector space is discoverable by context encoding large corpii.
Language is a very sophisticated and ancient tool that allows some reasoning to be performed by simple algebraic transformations inherent to the language.
-
[Mikolov et al] : Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781
& https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/