I’m not convinced by Anil Seth’s narrative about our biases in mind attribution.
I’ve been to his talk where he summarized these points. He talked about our inherent tendency to emotionally relate to entities that can use language. Later, he presented a picture of a transistor and a picture of a monkey and asked which seems more conscious on priors.
The prime mechanism by which human decide whether an entity is valuable and conscious is empathy. We are evolved to feel empathy—that is, modelling “what it is like to be them”—towards entities that have faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body. We feel a lot of empathy for pets and babies—entities that don’t control language. And we feel zero empathy for the Chinese room.
The argument relies a lot on trying to depict computers as something rigid, cold and dead and life as something interesting, warm and energetic. This works well for our empathy module but does not convince me as a philosophical argument.
I’m curious whether there’s any definition of brain’s processes as “non-algorithmic” that doesn’t end up in Russellian monism (which I’m inclined to support but suspect Seth isn’t). Aren’t the laws of physics themselves an algorithm? I see autopoiesis as the most interesting connection between consciousness and life but precisely when you find a clear conceptualization like this, it becomes unclear
why it couldn’t be implemented digitally—e.g. aren’t LLMs autopoietic systems, where each token determines the next one?
what predictions it makes about the variation in human consciousness (in terms of modalities, intensity and reportability)? E.g. if consciousness is dependent on the degree of embodiment, does it predict Stephen Hawking had a low intensity of consciousness? Is the variance found in human consciousness better explained by the computational differences or differences in the mentioned random biological interactions?
disclaimer: I am not too well-versed on the philosophy here so I could be saying dumb things, feel free to correct:
From my computational physics experience I know that it is physically impossible to simulate the exact electrical properties of a system of a couple hundred atoms on a classical digital computer, due to a blowup in computational complexity.
The laws of physics could be described as an algorithm, but the algorithm in question is on a level of complexity that is impossible for digital simulations to match. I think it’s generally agreed that some degree of complexity is required for consciousness: it doesn’t seem insane to say that that complexity might lie past what is digitally simulatable in practice.
The question of digital consciousness seems to depend on whether simulated abstracted approximations to the physical process of thinking are close enough to produce the same effect.
Asking whether a process is “close enough [to the brain] to produce the same effect” implicitly begs the question—i.e. assumes consciousness is biological.
P-zombies who wouldn’t describe their sensations in terms like “qualia” would likely have an evolutionary fit that’s equal to humans. I don’t know if they’re possible, but I think it demonstrates evolution wasn’t optimizing for consciousness. Therefore, we shouldn’t ask “is such system sufficiently close to the brain” but “is it sufficiently close to the processes that happen to make brain (phenomenally) conscious”.
In general, there isn’t agreement about any correlate of consciousness within philosophy of mind—there are well regarded thinkers who claim it’s not real (Frankish) or that it’s the basic substance of the universe (Goff). I think it’s possible consciousness is similar to, say, intelligence or humor, which means you need a complex system to meaningfully implement it. However, I think it’s unlikely that “complexity itself” is what gives rise to consciousness, e.g. sunspots are very complex (~unpredictable interaction of many elements).
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that complexity itself was the cause of consciousness, just that some level of algorithmic complexity may be a requirement for consciousness. This seems like a common position: the prospect of present or future LLM sentience is a subject of debate, but it’s rare to see a similar debate about the sentience of a pocket calculator.
A brain and a digital simulation have some similarities, but they also have a lot of differences. One of those differences is that the brains are running on “laws of physics” algorithms that are overwhelmingly faster and more complex than that of digital simulations. They didn’t need to evolve these “algorithms”: it’s inherent to any biological process. Seth identifies several other differences as well: continuous operation, embodiment, etc. His position seems to be that at least one of these differences may result in a lack of consciousness.
I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
As a side note, I would take for granted that all animals and digital systems are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal or digital system shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what “hot” means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of what an LLM experienced writing a message exceeding the mean intensity of human experiences. It still seems super hard to get numbers for this, but what they refer to may be more concrete than a vague concept like sentience.
I do not see how philosophical zombies (p-zombies) could be physically possible. If they were just like humans at a fundamental physical level, they would in fact be humans. So they would be as conscious as humans, which I assume are conscious (because I am a conscious human right now, and other humans do not seem relevantly different).
I endorse the temperature approach. I’m not sure illusionists would accept the question “What’s the % probability that an entity is conscious?” as meaningful but maybe a similar question could indeed be universally accepted, like “Compared to your pain intensity 1 (being poked by a needle), what’s your central estimate for the intensity of suffering experienced in scenario X?”
Just to clarify, my argument didn’t concern classical p-zombies but what I call “honest p-zombies”—intelligent humanoid entities capable of metacognition but without any intuition similar to our phenomenal intuitions.
From my computational physics experience I know that it is physically impossible to simulate the exact electrical properties of a system of a couple hundred atoms on a classical digital computer, due to a blowup in computational complexity.
We are evolved to feel empathy—that is, modelling “what it is like to be them”—towards entities that have faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body. We feel a lot of empathy for pets and babies—entities that don’t control language
People empathise with ChatGPT transcripts too; the key distinction is between empathising with a wide range of physiological and behavioural cues as opposed to a narrow one. For all its flaws, observing whether they are like us seems like a more plausible way of establishing likely consciousness than aptitude for symbolic manipulation. Disintermediated by a computer to replace biases introduced by cuteness and non-verbal expressiveness with biases introduced by symbolic manipulation, humans would without exception rate a pocket calculator or Eliza- style toy script as more likely to be conscious than a dog or a two year old child. I don’t think anyone sincerely believes this to actually be the case. A corollary of this is that facility with human language and mathematics—something most entities considered to be conscious do not possess—is not a particularly good standalone proxy for consciousness, even if the entity under examination is much much better at it than Eliza.
Unless we’re positing dualism, what we perceive at consciousness is an emergent property of complex chemical processes rooted in our biology (and the imperatives of our biology to survive and self replicate.. That’s the case whether we empathise with other entities that share this biology, dispassionately analyse the likelihood we evolved from a common ancestor or torture them into demonstrating similar stress hormone responses to humans. That doesn’t necessarily mean warm blooded DNA-replicating machines with limbs and fur and cute eyes are the only possible form of consciousness, but it is something we have and current “AI” doesn’t even have a loose analogue of. And yes, obsession with symbolic manipulation is doing an awful lot of work to explain why people are concerned about the consciousness of assemblies of silicon chips running specific software whilst disregarding the possibility of the sentience of more complex and interesting long running processes like forests, rivers or planetary systems, or indeed larger assemblies of silicon chips running software that doesn’t transform human text into cute replies.
Disintermediated by a computer to replace biases introduced by cuteness and non-verbal expressiveness with biases introduced by symbolic manipulation, humans would without exception rate a pocket calculator or Eliza- style toy script as more likely to be conscious than a dog or a two year old child. I don’t think anyone sincerely believes this to actually be the case.
I’m not sure what you’re imagining here. If you give people a trolley problem (only via text) and say on one track, there’s a dog and on the other one, there’s a computer program Eliza and they can chat to either, most would choose to save the dog, even if its only text output were “whoof whoof”.
If you’re imagining the thought experiment would somehow block them to make the inference that one entity is an actual dog and the other a program, then yes: I agree with the point that language increases empathy but I’d say the magnitude is much smaller than “non-verbal cues”. If you had a Trolley dilemma with one blank track and one track with either a dog or Eliza, I think 90% would pay $0 to save Eliza but a often a lot of money to save the dog.
Unless we’re positing dualism, what we perceive at consciousness is an emergent property of complex chemical processes rooted in our biology (and the imperatives of our biology to survive and self replicate.
Most non-dualists would say consciousness is a feature of information processing (functionalists, illusionists, non-reductive materialists) or something as fundamental as physics (Russelian monism, pan(proto)psychism). The particular emergentist and biological theory that is rooted in the instinct to self-replicate and survive is something I’d expect 0.1-7% of philosophers of mind to endorse. But whatever the actual percentages, I definitely disagree dualism and this theory are the only options. The phrase “rooted in [biochemical processes]” is the least controversial but it still connotes something most might not endorse—i.e. that biology and chemistry is the correct category or level of description (Axis 3 in this taxonomy).
I’m not sure what you’re imagining here. If you give people a trolley problem (only via text) and say on one track, there’s a dog and on the other one, there’s a computer program Eliza and they can chat to either, most would choose to save the dog, even if its only text output were “whoof whoof”.
What I’m imagining, which I evidently didn’t make clear enough, is not a trolley problem but simply trying to discern whether something else is conscious without knowing whether it has “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body”, such as reading its output [if any] over a remote computer terminal.[1] In these circumstances, not only will humans be unable to find any grounds for empathy with almost all sentient beings, but they will find plenty of grounds to empathise with or at least attribute motivation and intent to software programs.[2] So in the absence of context there’s definitely a bias in mind attribution towards symbol manipulators; even trivially simple ones that merely mimic or perform arithmetic.
On the other hand it seems like the “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body” are actually a relatively useful heuristic, especially since adults are seldom deceived by taxidermy or cuddly toys in comparison to how easily they’re impressed by “cheap parlour trick” level AI
Are people more likely to empathise with entities with “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body” than disembodied entities with apparent facility with symbol manipulation? Possibly, though I think this varies,[3] but the relevant question is: are people more likely misplace their empathy in imputing basic consciousness to other mammals or imputing heightened consciousness to anything that can beat them at chess
The level of misattribution matters too. Our sense of empathy anthropomorphises dogs by overestimating their grasp of language and underestimating the extent to which they are motivated by smell, and anthropomorphises irritating repetitive hardcoded chatbots by assigning meaning and motivation which simply doesn’t exist.
Most non-dualists would say consciousness is a feature of information processing (functionalists, illusionists, non-reductive materialists) or something as fundamental as physics (Russelian monism, pan(proto)psychism)...The phrase “rooted in [biochemical processes]” is the least controversial but it still connotes something most might not endorse—i.e. that biology and chemistry is the correct category or level of description
The rooted in biochemical processes is the bit I’m aiming for here; I am not aware of a non-dualist theory which roots human cognition in something other than the biochemical processes of the body (I don’t think the biochemical processes of the body themselves particularly care whether philosophers of mind label them as the consequence of evolutionary imperatives, physics, function, or illusion.)[4] Perhaps I can only be fully confident of my own consciousness, but its relationship with my biochemistry and physiology does at least comes with a bunch of hypotheses originally tested on similar organisms (albeit many of those hypotheses I’d rather not test …).
Like Turing’s eponymous test, only not explicitly a test. Eliza might convince a human not primed to look for evidence it’s just a shoddy computer program that its outputs represent a stream of conscious thought; nobody’s going to try to follow the strains of thought in a dog’s typing...
or indeed if between 93% and 99.9% of them live lifestyles too chaste or avant garde to acknowledge the possibility that changes in their hormone balance and neurological state associated with [the prospect of] sex might be linked to evolutionary imperatives to reproduce ;-)
I can experimentally verify claims made about how certain changes to my biochemistry or physiology would affect my consciousness, though in most cases I’d rather not :)
Thanks for clarifying—sorry it might sound like I was twisting your words—I was trying to think through multiple versions of the experiment you propose.
The amount to which we attribute/misattribute consciousness to different entities depends on the correct theory, so it is very uncertain at this point. But I would endorse this broader research program of systematically decoding which of our intuitions about consciousness are biases and which are valid measurements of brain data.
One reason why I thought about Trolley problems was that they show not only % of people who have an abstract belief about consciousness but also the degree / intensity of its perceived experiences. I’m surprised to see a significant fraction of people (1, 2) say current AI is conscious, although a poll about a personal sacrifice like this one (in a less narrow Twitter bubble) might be more relevant to assess how serious they are—and might better model the kind of moral error that we’re more likely to make during the AGI transformation.
Regarding “biochemical processes”—the phrasing matters a lot here. Searle, who came up with The Chinese Room, concludes this thought experiment by suggesting thinking requires the specific biochemistry that brains use just like lactation or photosynthesis are defined by specific molecules, rather than algorithms. This formulation is specifically chosen in contrast to functionalist/computationalist views which are mainstream nowadays.
I’m not convinced by Anil Seth’s narrative about our biases in mind attribution.
I’ve been to his talk where he summarized these points. He talked about our inherent tendency to emotionally relate to entities that can use language. Later, he presented a picture of a transistor and a picture of a monkey and asked which seems more conscious on priors.
The prime mechanism by which human decide whether an entity is valuable and conscious is empathy. We are evolved to feel empathy—that is, modelling “what it is like to be them”—towards entities that have faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body. We feel a lot of empathy for pets and babies—entities that don’t control language. And we feel zero empathy for the Chinese room.
The argument relies a lot on trying to depict computers as something rigid, cold and dead and life as something interesting, warm and energetic. This works well for our empathy module but does not convince me as a philosophical argument.
I’m curious whether there’s any definition of brain’s processes as “non-algorithmic” that doesn’t end up in Russellian monism (which I’m inclined to support but suspect Seth isn’t). Aren’t the laws of physics themselves an algorithm? I see autopoiesis as the most interesting connection between consciousness and life but precisely when you find a clear conceptualization like this, it becomes unclear
why it couldn’t be implemented digitally—e.g. aren’t LLMs autopoietic systems, where each token determines the next one?
what predictions it makes about the variation in human consciousness (in terms of modalities, intensity and reportability)? E.g. if consciousness is dependent on the degree of embodiment, does it predict Stephen Hawking had a low intensity of consciousness? Is the variance found in human consciousness better explained by the computational differences or differences in the mentioned random biological interactions?
disclaimer: I am not too well-versed on the philosophy here so I could be saying dumb things, feel free to correct:
From my computational physics experience I know that it is physically impossible to simulate the exact electrical properties of a system of a couple hundred atoms on a classical digital computer, due to a blowup in computational complexity.
The laws of physics could be described as an algorithm, but the algorithm in question is on a level of complexity that is impossible for digital simulations to match. I think it’s generally agreed that some degree of complexity is required for consciousness: it doesn’t seem insane to say that that complexity might lie past what is digitally simulatable in practice.
The question of digital consciousness seems to depend on whether simulated abstracted approximations to the physical process of thinking are close enough to produce the same effect.
Asking whether a process is “close enough [to the brain] to produce the same effect” implicitly begs the question—i.e. assumes consciousness is biological.
P-zombies who wouldn’t describe their sensations in terms like “qualia” would likely have an evolutionary fit that’s equal to humans. I don’t know if they’re possible, but I think it demonstrates evolution wasn’t optimizing for consciousness. Therefore, we shouldn’t ask “is such system sufficiently close to the brain” but “is it sufficiently close to the processes that happen to make brain (phenomenally) conscious”.
In general, there isn’t agreement about any correlate of consciousness within philosophy of mind—there are well regarded thinkers who claim it’s not real (Frankish) or that it’s the basic substance of the universe (Goff). I think it’s possible consciousness is similar to, say, intelligence or humor, which means you need a complex system to meaningfully implement it. However, I think it’s unlikely that “complexity itself” is what gives rise to consciousness, e.g. sunspots are very complex (~unpredictable interaction of many elements).
To be clear, I wasn’t saying that complexity itself was the cause of consciousness, just that some level of algorithmic complexity may be a requirement for consciousness. This seems like a common position: the prospect of present or future LLM sentience is a subject of debate, but it’s rare to see a similar debate about the sentience of a pocket calculator.
A brain and a digital simulation have some similarities, but they also have a lot of differences. One of those differences is that the brains are running on “laws of physics” algorithms that are overwhelmingly faster and more complex than that of digital simulations. They didn’t need to evolve these “algorithms”: it’s inherent to any biological process. Seth identifies several other differences as well: continuous operation, embodiment, etc. His position seems to be that at least one of these differences may result in a lack of consciousness.
Hi Daniel and titotal. Thanks for the discussion.
I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
As a side note, I would take for granted that all animals and digital systems are sentient, and focus on assessing the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences. I think asking about the probability of sentience of an animal or digital system shares some of the issues of asking about the probability that an object is hot. People have different concepts about what “hot” means, and they do not depend just on temperature (for example, the minimum temperature for hot wood is higher than the minimum temperature for hot metal because this transfers heat more efficiently). I understand sentience as having subjective experiences whose intensity is not exactly 0. However, I suspect some people understand it as having subjective experiences which are sufficiently intense. Different bars for this will lead to different probabilities. Asking about the distribution of the intensity of subjective experiences mitigates this. For example, one could ask about the probability of the mean intensity of what an LLM experienced writing a message exceeding the mean intensity of human experiences. It still seems super hard to get numbers for this, but what they refer to may be more concrete than a vague concept like sentience.
I do not see how philosophical zombies (p-zombies) could be physically possible. If they were just like humans at a fundamental physical level, they would in fact be humans. So they would be as conscious as humans, which I assume are conscious (because I am a conscious human right now, and other humans do not seem relevantly different).
I endorse the temperature approach. I’m not sure illusionists would accept the question “What’s the % probability that an entity is conscious?” as meaningful but maybe a similar question could indeed be universally accepted, like “Compared to your pain intensity 1 (being poked by a needle), what’s your central estimate for the intensity of suffering experienced in scenario X?”
Just to clarify, my argument didn’t concern classical p-zombies but what I call “honest p-zombies”—intelligent humanoid entities capable of metacognition but without any intuition similar to our phenomenal intuitions.
Relatedly, I liked the post Costs of Embodiment.
People empathise with ChatGPT transcripts too; the key distinction is between empathising with a wide range of physiological and behavioural cues as opposed to a narrow one. For all its flaws, observing whether they are like us seems like a more plausible way of establishing likely consciousness than aptitude for symbolic manipulation. Disintermediated by a computer to replace biases introduced by cuteness and non-verbal expressiveness with biases introduced by symbolic manipulation, humans would without exception rate a pocket calculator or Eliza- style toy script as more likely to be conscious than a dog or a two year old child. I don’t think anyone sincerely believes this to actually be the case. A corollary of this is that facility with human language and mathematics—something most entities considered to be conscious do not possess—is not a particularly good standalone proxy for consciousness, even if the entity under examination is much much better at it than Eliza.
Unless we’re positing dualism, what we perceive at consciousness is an emergent property of complex chemical processes rooted in our biology (and the imperatives of our biology to survive and self replicate.. That’s the case whether we empathise with other entities that share this biology, dispassionately analyse the likelihood we evolved from a common ancestor or torture them into demonstrating similar stress hormone responses to humans. That doesn’t necessarily mean warm blooded DNA-replicating machines with limbs and fur and cute eyes are the only possible form of consciousness, but it is something we have and current “AI” doesn’t even have a loose analogue of. And yes, obsession with symbolic manipulation is doing an awful lot of work to explain why people are concerned about the consciousness of assemblies of silicon chips running specific software whilst disregarding the possibility of the sentience of more complex and interesting long running processes like forests, rivers or planetary systems, or indeed larger assemblies of silicon chips running software that doesn’t transform human text into cute replies.
I’m not sure what you’re imagining here. If you give people a trolley problem (only via text) and say on one track, there’s a dog and on the other one, there’s a computer program Eliza and they can chat to either, most would choose to save the dog, even if its only text output were “whoof whoof”.
If you’re imagining the thought experiment would somehow block them to make the inference that one entity is an actual dog and the other a program, then yes: I agree with the point that language increases empathy but I’d say the magnitude is much smaller than “non-verbal cues”. If you had a Trolley dilemma with one blank track and one track with either a dog or Eliza, I think 90% would pay $0 to save Eliza but a often a lot of money to save the dog.
Most non-dualists would say consciousness is a feature of information processing (functionalists, illusionists, non-reductive materialists) or something as fundamental as physics (Russelian monism, pan(proto)psychism). The particular emergentist and biological theory that is rooted in the instinct to self-replicate and survive is something I’d expect 0.1-7% of philosophers of mind to endorse. But whatever the actual percentages, I definitely disagree dualism and this theory are the only options. The phrase “rooted in [biochemical processes]” is the least controversial but it still connotes something most might not endorse—i.e. that biology and chemistry is the correct category or level of description (Axis 3 in this taxonomy).
What I’m imagining, which I evidently didn’t make clear enough, is not a trolley problem but simply trying to discern whether something else is conscious without knowing whether it has “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body”, such as reading its output [if any] over a remote computer terminal.[1] In these circumstances, not only will humans be unable to find any grounds for empathy with almost all sentient beings, but they will find plenty of grounds to empathise with or at least attribute motivation and intent to software programs.[2] So in the absence of context there’s definitely a bias in mind attribution towards symbol manipulators; even trivially simple ones that merely mimic or perform arithmetic.
On the other hand it seems like the “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body” are actually a relatively useful heuristic, especially since adults are seldom deceived by taxidermy or cuddly toys in comparison to how easily they’re impressed by “cheap parlour trick” level AI
Are people more likely to empathise with entities with “faces, limbs, fur and a squishy body” than disembodied entities with apparent facility with symbol manipulation? Possibly, though I think this varies,[3] but the relevant question is: are people more likely misplace their empathy in imputing basic consciousness to other mammals or imputing heightened consciousness to anything that can beat them at chess
The level of misattribution matters too. Our sense of empathy anthropomorphises dogs by overestimating their grasp of language and underestimating the extent to which they are motivated by smell, and anthropomorphises irritating repetitive hardcoded chatbots by assigning meaning and motivation which simply doesn’t exist.
The rooted in biochemical processes is the bit I’m aiming for here; I am not aware of a non-dualist theory which roots human cognition in something other than the biochemical processes of the body (I don’t think the biochemical processes of the body themselves particularly care whether philosophers of mind label them as the consequence of evolutionary imperatives, physics, function, or illusion.)[4] Perhaps I can only be fully confident of my own consciousness, but its relationship with my biochemistry and physiology does at least comes with a bunch of hypotheses originally tested on similar organisms (albeit many of those hypotheses I’d rather not test …).
Like Turing’s eponymous test, only not explicitly a test. Eliza might convince a human not primed to look for evidence it’s just a shoddy computer program that its outputs represent a stream of conscious thought; nobody’s going to try to follow the strains of thought in a dog’s typing...
including those [near]-universally agreed to be too simple to have any sort of motivation, intent or consciousness
No shortage of people who have developed feelings for ChatGPT, and I bet most of them eat cute farm animals
or indeed if between 93% and 99.9% of them live lifestyles too chaste or avant garde to acknowledge the possibility that changes in their hormone balance and neurological state associated with [the prospect of] sex might be linked to evolutionary imperatives to reproduce ;-)
I can experimentally verify claims made about how certain changes to my biochemistry or physiology would affect my consciousness, though in most cases I’d rather not :)
Thanks for clarifying—sorry it might sound like I was twisting your words—I was trying to think through multiple versions of the experiment you propose.
The amount to which we attribute/misattribute consciousness to different entities depends on the correct theory, so it is very uncertain at this point. But I would endorse this broader research program of systematically decoding which of our intuitions about consciousness are biases and which are valid measurements of brain data.
One reason why I thought about Trolley problems was that they show not only % of people who have an abstract belief about consciousness but also the degree / intensity of its perceived experiences. I’m surprised to see a significant fraction of people (1, 2) say current AI is conscious, although a poll about a personal sacrifice like this one (in a less narrow Twitter bubble) might be more relevant to assess how serious they are—and might better model the kind of moral error that we’re more likely to make during the AGI transformation.
Regarding “biochemical processes”—the phrasing matters a lot here. Searle, who came up with The Chinese Room, concludes this thought experiment by suggesting thinking requires the specific biochemistry that brains use just like lactation or photosynthesis are defined by specific molecules, rather than algorithms. This formulation is specifically chosen in contrast to functionalist/computationalist views which are mainstream nowadays.