And again you assign a property or not to things that perform indistinguishably. Your definition is useless. It may as well be based on the tin of beans.
> In reality the material difference between a computing machine and a brain is trivial
No it isn’t. You are making the strong statements about how the brain works that you argued against at the start.
> Among other practical differences such as guarantee of function over long term.
Once again ignoring the setup of the argument. The solution to the chinese room isn’t “the trick is to wait long enough”.
I don’t know why you want to argue about this given you so clearly reject the entire concept of the thought experiment.
I find the entire thing to be intellectual wankery. A very simple and ethical solution is that if two things appear conscious from the outside then just treat them both as such. Job done. I don’t need to find excuses like “ah but inside there’s a book!” Or “it’s manipulations are on the syntactic level if we just look inside” or “but it’s just valves!” I can simply not mistreat anything that appears conscious.
All of this feels like a scared response to the idea that maybe we’re not special.
