Consciousness is not computation
&gt; Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.<p>This strikes me as somewhat of a circular argument.<p>If you actually tried this experiment with current computers, you would completely fail to convince anyone outside the room there was a Chinese speaker in the room.  You would definitely not pass the Turing Test.  After a few sentences, it&#x27;s pretty easy to figure out that a computer program isn&#x27;t a human, even with today&#x27;s best artificial intelligence.  AI programs generally don&#x27;t even &quot;remember&quot; what the previous question you asked was, yet alone hold opinions or beliefs.<p>If some future comptuer were able to convince someone that there was a Chinese speaker in the room, then I would argue that there would in fact be a Chinese speaker in the room - the computer program itself.<p>&gt; The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.<p>The man isn&#x27;t the program.  The man is just executing the program.  It&#x27;s the program that has (or doesn&#x27;t have) conciousness, not the man.  This is like saying a brain is made of axons, and an axon can&#x27;t possibly be concious because it just transmits an action potential, therefore people can&#x27;t possibly be concious.