> but my question is if you, the human, can learn to understand what it is to perceive magnetic fields? I think obviously the answer is yes.
I think it's obviously no, because we don't have sensations of magnetic fields. It's the question of what it's like to be a bat raised by Thomas Nagel. The aliens can give us their words for conscious magnetic sensations which we can learn to use, but we won't experience them. We're basically p-zombies when it comes to non-human experiences.
> There I think the resolution is that the human following instructions does not understand Chinese but the room, the system of instructions + the human to follow them does. In a similar way obviously an individual neuron doesn't understand anything but brains do.
Searle's response to the systems objection is that we already know that brains understand Chinese. But we don't know this for the room. I would further say that brains alone don't understand anything, humans understand things as language users embedded in a social and physical world. One can invoke Wittgenstein and language games here.
I think it's obviously no, because we don't have sensations of magnetic fields. It's the question of what it's like to be a bat raised by Thomas Nagel. The aliens can give us their words for conscious magnetic sensations which we can learn to use, but we won't experience them. We're basically p-zombies when it comes to non-human experiences.
> There I think the resolution is that the human following instructions does not understand Chinese but the room, the system of instructions + the human to follow them does. In a similar way obviously an individual neuron doesn't understand anything but brains do.
Searle's response to the systems objection is that we already know that brains understand Chinese. But we don't know this for the room. I would further say that brains alone don't understand anything, humans understand things as language users embedded in a social and physical world. One can invoke Wittgenstein and language games here.