The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.

Nassim Taleb

Here comes the supremos to equate money with speech.

You can’t prove a human isn’t a Chinese Room.

Humans have emotions.

So either Chinese Rooms can have emotions or we are unable to show whether Chinese Rooms have emotions.

Either way, the Chinese Room isn’t enlightening on the question of AI suffering.

Looking around, it seems we don’t know whether a Chinese Room can have emotions, which suggests that we don’t understand what it means to have a emotions.

The discussion was about suffering which I take to be an emotional response. The comment I responded to seem to say a “chinese room” argument was a unassailable argument without elaborating why. The only way I make sense of that comment is that the author thinks it’s already proved that a Chinese Room can’t experience emotions.

Yes, the Chinese Room argument was originally about understanding but I don’t see how that enters into this discussion.

In this context the question is whether a Chinese room can suffer. We can’t show a human isn’t a Chinese room, humans can suffer so we can’t show every Chinese room doesn’t suffer.

Chinese room is not at all airtight. We don’t know what it means to have emotions so we can’t prove a Chinese room can’t have emotions.