Clearly the only reasonable answer is “no, not in general”.
I challenge this. Either you relax the communication channel in such a way that I can access other kinds of information (brain scans, purchase history, body language, etc.) or you do not get to say “not in general”, because there’s nothing general about two people communicating only through a terminal.
To me it’s like you’re saying “can you tell me how a cake smells by a picture? No! So I’m not sure that smells are really communicable”. Hm.
I think the point does hold in general. There can be many possible internal experiences corresponding to any given input-output map. To the extent that’s true, Chinese Room type arguments stay unresolved. Unless you define high resolution brain scans as part of input/output, but that seems far from the spirit of Chinese Room.
I challenge this.
Either you relax the communication channel in such a way that I can access other kinds of information (brain scans, purchase history, body language, etc.) or you do not get to say “not in general”, because there’s nothing general about two people communicating only through a terminal.
To me it’s like you’re saying “can you tell me how a cake smells by a picture? No! So I’m not sure that smells are really communicable”. Hm.
I think the point does hold in general. There can be many possible internal experiences corresponding to any given input-output map. To the extent that’s true, Chinese Room type arguments stay unresolved. Unless you define high resolution brain scans as part of input/output, but that seems far from the spirit of Chinese Room.