The Chinese Room Argument (CRA) was published by John Searle to argue that “conscious states are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain and are themselves higher level features of the brain.” (Searle 2002b, p.9 ) CRA is a good start for this response paper to achieve the goal of describing what is referred to as the eighth sin. The problem in the CRA is that it is based on the premise that consciousness can be understood by defining it in terms of the physical entities like the room itself, or the person in the room (the hardware), or even the manual in the room (the software). However, I argue that this the first end of the conflict in understanding consciousness.
Christopher Cherniak’s “The Riddle of the Universe and It’s Solutions” lays out a paradox or a strange loop, where people with a certain understanding of a piece of knowledge are lead to a deadly plague, “The Riddle”. This paradox is an explanation of how a definition of higher-level abstract entity falls into an illogical trail of statements. Does the riddle exists? If yes, how can we understand it? Understanding in this thought experiment is being informative enough to read the riddle without dying of the riddle’s coma, which is falling into the system of infinite loop of relative dualistic illogical reasoning.
The riddle here is consciousness. The riddle coma is defining consciousness in comparison to low and high-level physical entity. The paradox is that when we use the CRA to define consciousness, we present ourselves to the possibility of the riddle coma. But does that mean consciousness doesn’t exists? No, consciousness exists whether we are able to define it or not; the problem is with the definer (us) not the entity. The entity doesn’t follow a dualistic logical truth of being or not being - in an AI, room, or anything for that matter. Undergoing a dualistic point of view to determine whether something exists or not leads to denying the existence of something based solely on that point of view. Thus, it is inethical to define such entity as consciousness from a dualistic view; in fact, I would argue that any dualistic reference of anything is inethical.
To conclude, the eighth sin is an exaggerative expression to this inethical dualistic logic that leads to the denial of the presence of consciousness as binary outcome of True or False. And by inethical, I mean that it is beyond the realm of ethics.
