i like how this feeds back into what it means to even know something at all
in a way, me, someone who did not grow up in japan and only has a fraction of understanding of japanese culture from an outsider's perspective, speaking and understanding japanese is in a way no different from being the whole of the chinese room system, isn't it? i'm trying to communicate with and understand people through hook dictionaries and books that teach me grammar. maybe you could say in a way i'm different because i can indeed see あ and think "a" and see 水 and think "mizu/water", but again that's the whole of my japanese-comprehending system outputting a response.
is the way i speak american english the same? i'm a native speaker raised in america, yes, but do i really truly "understand" any of the things i'm saying? these are letters i'm typing onto a screen to communicate my thoughts because i know this combination of words is how people outside the room that is isla understand me.
so then you wonder "what is a people" exactly. i remember the guy who worked at google who was speaking with the LaMDA AI and became convinced she was no different from a human child because she met his threshold for being human—she literally passed this guy's personal turing test. she was repeating opinions she must have learned about and communicating them in her own unique sentences; she, through some means, decided that x was the best course of action for y problem, which is something we do with information ourselves all the time. people are just products of the people around us.
i have more thoughts on this but i'm getting tired. something something at what point does our way of making conjecture and strategizing become different. empathy, maybe? but there are people with low empathy in this world, who really can't understand why someone would be upset or happy about something they wouldn't personally be upset or happy about, so then do you need a concept of self? that example of a low-empathy person i just mentioned obviously has a concept of self. how do we figure out if an AI has a concept of self? can we program in a concept of self? there's character AI bots where people try to do just that by filling them with a factbank over time so you can roleplay with them...
oooo my eyes are gluing together.....post over