No. — Garrett Travers

So the projection-apple is projected by the brain?And you have an experience - the image of an apple (variable apple, if you like)?

Maybe you'd rather not call it the experience of a projection-apple. I'm open to other terminology.

Maybe you'd rather not call it the experience of a projection-apple. I'm open to other terminology. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes, an experience.

You're too gone, dude. That article was specifically disagreeing with you. Data comes from sensory data of the material world. That's where the correspondence works, that's what they were saying. I'm moving on now. — Garrett Travers

Do you understand a difference between "data comes from the senses", and "data is the material world"? In the former, "data" requires sensation. In the latter "data" requires a material world. When the scientist produces a model designed to correspond with the data, which is derived from sensation, the model is not designed to correspond with the material world. It is designed to correspond with the data derived from sensation. Whether or not there even is such a thing as "the material world" is completely irrelevant to that model. Have you heard of "model-dependent realism"?

Sorry, I don't even feel confident explaining a theory of language production, let alone intentionality. I couldn't even give you a particularly good recommendation on the language side. All the work I've seen is very much in the early stages, with multiple competing hypotheses, and a lot of interesting experimental findings, but certainly not a holistic answer.

However, I would argue that the premise that intentionality is a prerequisite for language use seems pretty vulnerable. Why is that necissarily the case? The Chinese Room thought experiment illustrates a difference between comprehending and using language. One seems completely possible without the other.

AI chatbots, although still fairly weak, have come a long way in the last few years. The Microsoft Dataverse has made the technology available at a much lower price point and I expect that being able to ask questions about your data in natural language to an AI will be a standard feature of higher end business intelligence platforms within just a few years (meaning the public sector will get it sometime around 2080, or whenever their ancient Access based solutions stop being supported ).

A cheap Alexa under $200 can be asked to look up the score of a game, search for a recipe, let you know the weather, or recommend you a movie based on your specific tastes with verbal commands.

High end AI can do more impressive things. It can tell a story about a picture. You can feed it some text from a work of fiction and it will write a plausible continuation using the same style. It can trawl the web for facts related to some topic and write a blog post about it.

Now to be fair, while the stories are actually quite impressive, the AI blogs are usually shit for some reason. Knowing what is interesting about a topic appears to be much harder than aping an existing style. However, I have also received papers from undergraduates who also simply trawled the web and tried to say something interesting about a topic that were even worse than these AI efforts.

Plus, Watson stomped Ken Jennings and the other Jeopardy! champs like a decade ago.

So, if a computer generated chat bot can produce language well enough that it will fool most people, and if it can provide answers to questions that are better than those a call center employee generally would, a place we may arrive at in the medium term, it seems that either:

Computers have intentionality; or
Using language doesn't require intentionality.

Some people would argue intentionality doesn't even exist anyhow, but that's aside the point.

All that said, language doesn't seem like a huge problem. But for dualists? Why does intentionality and language use only show up in living things? Why does the most complex use of language show up in the living thing with the most complex nervous system? If a non-physical life force guides these things, why don't plants exhibit them? Why can't my pen, or a rock, or a cloud demonstrate them? If the phenomena aren't driven by physical forces, why should they only show up in things with a particular physical structure? There is also the whole issue of brain injuries to areas that see increased activity during language use destroying a person's ability to use language, or anesthetics knocking out the ability to use a non-physical ability.

There is the violation of Ockham's Razor on the one hand, since the new force being introduced doesn't seem to offer additional predictive power, and the inability to explain things physicalism can explain on the other.

If intentionality is a non-physical phenomena, it must at the least still be partly caused by physical things. But then you have the problem of how two totally different things interact, and how they can interact without leaving behind detectable evidence.

As to meaning: DNA has meaning, you can apply a semiotic triangle to it. However, do ribosomes exhibit intentionality?

Meaning (information) is one of the most interesting and fascinating parts of the physical world. Information theory has become one of the biggest influences in changing the sciences in the past decades, right up there with chaos and emergence, although maybe a decade or two behind in acceptance. It has created its own subfields in physics, economics, and biology.

I'm not convinced that the physical meaning of information theory, which finds instantiations of information down to the level of fundemental particles, is necessarily something entirely different from the meaning of language.

The Great Courses lectures (The Science of Information) on this are particularly good as an intro btw. Although if you get bored when it turns towards cryptography and error correction, you can probably skip ahead to information in biology, sports, and physics without being too lost.

But at the centre of those reactions, is interpretation - what the sentence means. Animals react to threats or other stimuli, but we alone interpret the meaning of words

I'm just not sure if I buy this. When I call my cats for dinner, they come running, whereas they will ignore me at other times. They appear to know which call means food. Pavlov's dog appears to have learned the referent that the bell was used as a symbol for.

I've taught my in law's dog a few commands too. They get that different verbal commands refer to different things.

This works at a smaller level too. The "alphabet" of DNA appears to function as a symbol. It has a clear referent, the proteins it is coding for, and an interpretant, the transcription RNA.

Yes, an experience. — Garrett Travers

Does it bother you, or seem strange to you, to say one can have an experience of a non-existent?

Or: One can have an experience of something that doesn't exist?

— Garrett Travers

Or, possibly clearer:

Does it bother you, or does it seem strange to you, to say: There are thoughts, I can experience thoughts, but thoughts do not exist?

That said, it doesn't seem like a particularly tough case for physicalist models. We know that sensory organs record incoming information about the world. This information is then procesed and refined, so that it makes a coherent enough picture of the world that an animal can get by as respects fulfilling its biological needs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're stating the obvious, but none of that negates the kinds of philosophical problems that, for instance, Immanuel Kant set out to solve. In fact there's voluminous literature on Kant's contribution to cognitive science, and Bishop Berkeley wrote a treatise on optics. Schopenhauer also was keenly interested in the science of his day, and saw no conflict between it and his idealist metaphysics.

Second, information in every form we've studied turns out to be physical — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see how that can be justified. Information can to some extent be digitised, but the process of converting anything into digital code requires a reduction to begin with - the leaving out of unnecessary details. Furthermore, the interpretation of information again is a noetic act which is something that in itself can't be digitised. Say, for instance, the reproduction of some great work of drama or tragedy. The script can be digitised and printed in English. But if you're a dolt - not saying you are - then you will have no idea what it means. But if you're attuned to the meaning, it might be a life-transforming experience - great art, great drama can be that. It is an interpretive act, a spontaneous arising of the understanding of what that tragedy means. How is that physical?

None you what you write comes to terms with what in philosophical discourse is defined as intentionality. It is a bare-bones speculative effort of what is involved in cognition.

However, if the meaning isn't physical, it seems hard to explain how it could refer to physical things so well, or how physical things like other people or dogs can meaningfully and consistently respond to language and find physical referents based on it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hence, philosophical dualism! On the one hand, we're biological creatures, who are born, get ill, reproduce and die, with a glandular system, metabolic system, and so on. But we're also meaning-seeking and meaning-creating creatures, and in that respect starkly different to other animals. We live in a meaning-world, a lifeworld, a lebenswelt, where meaning, ideas, concepts, reason, are foundational realities, not just the fortuitous byproducts of a blind watchmaker (see this review.). The problem is, our culture has obliterated that distinction, on the basis that evolutionary biology sees us as on a continuum with our biological forbears. But this is just where evolutionary biology is actually a crap philosophy, or not really a philosophy at all. It's a biological theory, which nowadays is assigned the role of philosophy, for which it is badly equipped. So for this culture, everything is 'just naturally' understandable in terms of evolutionary and biological metaphors - they're the glasses our culture has trained us to see things through. But the task of philosophical criticism is to learn to look at those glasses and not simply through them.

Creatures are objects. — Garrett Travers

And they are also, and foremost, subjects of experience. Added to which humans are rational subjects of experience, able to reflect on the meaning of experience. No object does that.

So, before humans existed, force did not equal mass times acceleration? This is something that only exists when it is recognised by humans?
— Wayfarer

That's not what I said. — Garrett Travers

It is the meaning of what you said:

F=ma is a concept that humans generated to understand how to properly categorize it as a pattern. — Garrett Travers

So, to re-phrase, F=MA is something that is real, irrespective of whether the concept has been 'generated'. The point I was making originally, anyway, is that even though science has discovered such fundamental principles, science doesn't explain why f=ma or e=mc². What scientific laws and principles are, and whether they exist independently of the humans who discover them, is a very interesting question, but it's not a scientific question. Not that I expect this will be understood, because proponents of scientism never understand what it means, or that it is something they're propounding.

[Cats] appear to know which call means food — Count Timothy von Icarus

No kidding. I have owned both cats and dogs, and some of my dogs understand quite a few words. One would bark if someone said 'Hi' within earshot, because he thought you were greeting someone. Dogs are affected by my tone, like if you shout or scold, but if I calmly said to my dog, 'you are an obnoxious creature, and I'm going to shoot you in the morning', it would wag its tail oblivious until it saw the gun (and then only if it had previously experienced the sound of guns.)

What the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients - sense-knowledge in which s/he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent. — Jacques Maritain

This is also something which could not be explained to a dog.

Right, there shouldn't be a need to reduce abstractions to claim they are physical. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem I see is with "intention". Intention is what gives causality to abstractions. We might assume that the abstractions are tools put to use in the world, and we could ground them in a physical attribute of the physical human being, like the brain. But the abstractions only become causal under the influence of intention, they are put to work toward a purpose. Being grounded in intention rather than the physical brain, brings us in the opposite direction of giving the abstractions physical status. Intention is related to a will toward the future, what will be, and so it cannot be assigned to any physical attribute of the human being.

This is how the mind differs from the senses. The senses are all directed toward a type of physical attribute proper to the sense organ. But the mind, being directed by intention is directed toward an "object" in the sense of a goal. And the goal has no material existence, having not yet been brought into existence. That's why the "object" which is proper to the mind is immaterial, while the senses have "objects" which are material.

If intentionality is a non-physical phenomena, it must at the least still be partly caused by physical things. But then you have the problem of how two totally different things interact, and how they can interact without leaving behind detectable evidence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think this is a proper representation of intentionality. Intentionality at its base is very general, and therefore we cannot say that it is caused in any way by particular things. Consider a base feeling like hunger, and the specific intention to eat, which we might say is "caused" by that base feeling. Notice that the intention is very general, not caused by a particular physical thing desired. Only through the direction of the mind does intention become focused on a particular thing, the intent to eat a particular food item. We cannot say that the physical object which is desired is the cause of the intention. And since intention begins as something very general, it's just a general feeling, I don't see how it could be caused by any physical thing, or even a group of physical things, which are particulars.

This is the same issue as inductive reasoning, only inverted. With inductive reasoning we produce a general principle from observing a number of particular instances. There is no way that we can say that the physical particulars, no matter how many there be, are the cause of the inductive conclusion. We do not have the premise required, to conclude that a whole bunch of physical particulars have actually caused the existence of a general principle. What really causes the actual existence of the general principle is the act of reasoning.

So, if a computer generated chat bot can produce language well enough that it will fool most people, and if it can provide answers to questions that are better than those a call center employee generally would, a place we may arrive at in the medium term, it seems that either:

Computers have intentionality; or
Using language doesn't require intentionality.

Some people would argue intentionality doesn't even exist anyhow, but that's aside the point. — Count Timothy von Icarus

First, the term 'intentionality' as I was intending it, and as it is used in phenomenology, refers to the fact that language, at least a good part of it, is about things. I was not intending to use the term in it's "normal" usage as referring to having intentions.

Second, given the sense of 'intentionality' I was using, whether or not the speaker or author has any intentions regarding what the language they are using is about, the language use is, in itself, about whatever it is about (although of course a recipient competent enough in the given language to be able to understand what it is about is required).

And third, even if computers are able to fool us, that is only on account of the fact that we have created and programmed them well enough to be able to achieve that feat of deceit.

It is a projection from my brain being produced from stored memory data in the hippocampus. — Garrett Travers

Your account is metaphorical, my spunky young friend. What screen is the apple projected onto?

However, if the meaning isn't physical, it seems hard to explain how it could refer to physical things so well, or how physical things like other people or dogs can meaningfully and consistently respond to language and find physical referents based on it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I also want to call out how the statement 'physical things like other people' begs the question. What is at issue is, among other things, whether people - human beings - are only physical, yet here you're starting from the premise that they are. Humans are physical in some respects - a parachutist will fall at the same rate as a bag of concrete (as Galileo discovered), although the consequence of a parachute malfunction is considered serious in the case of humans, not so much for objects. And why? Because humans are subjects of experience, not simply objects, like bags of concrete are. And it is the nature of the subject which materialism cannot account for, other than by claiming that it is something that must be eliminated..

Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water, after enlightenment, know that you necissarily must chop wood and carry water. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That koan is singularly innappropriate, given the context.

if the eliminativist vis-á-vis abstractions (or qualia) is correct, we shouldn't expect them to be able to overcome this illusion. So if they continue to say they feel tired, or advocate against racism, etc. it is only because the illusion is so powerful, which is exactly what their theory predicts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”

“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?” — NY Times

There's a clear answer to this: that science deals wholly and solely with the properties of objects. And humans are not (only) objects, but subjects of experience - which is the whole point of the hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness is a hard problem for objective science, specifically because it is the property of a subject, and the subject by definition is not something that has been taken into account by the objective sciences - up until the point, that is, that quantum physics reached through the glass of the observatory and punched the observing scientists on the nose.

One problem with materialism is contained in Lenin's statement "that, with every great scientific discovery, the definition of materialism changes radically." (Zizek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism)

Since when is learning from (i.e. adapting an old concept to) new information (and 'better' explanations) a "problem" for philosophy?

What screen is the apple projected onto? — bert1

It shouldn't be a problem as his next assertion is: projections do not exist. If to do their work they don't need to exist, I don't suppose they'll need a screen.

That koan is singularly innappropriate, given the context.

I know, that's why I like it so much. It's a perfect inversion.:grin: Being a moist robot IS the real enlightenment for the eliminativist.

begs the question

I wasn't trying to. I mentioned people in the context of other objects because I meant "people insomuch as they are objects," but phrases like that give precision at the cost of bloat. The point wasn't that people are necissarily physical, moreso that if a dad tells their kid, "go ask mom," the child's prephilosophical command on language gives them no trouble looking for the physical room in which their mom is located.

...none of that negates the kinds of philosophical problems that, for instance, Immanuel Kant set out to solve. In fact there's voluminous literature on Kant's contribution to cognitive science, and Bishop Berkeley wrote a treatise on optics. Schopenhauer also was keenly interested in the science of his day, and saw no conflict between it and his idealist metaphysics.

Such as? I think I agree though. There are practicing dualist neuroscientists, physicists who appear to embrace some flavor of idealism, etc. I don't think your ontological leanings result in any necissary barrier to contributing to science or philosophy, especially if you're willing to consider evidence for opposing views in stride. This is why I said I haven't seen versions of "epistemological physicalism," that appear necissarily "physicalist."

Rather, coherence demands a good reason for accepting ideas that overturn fundemental scientific findings, so what we might call "non-physical causes" tend to have a higher bar to pass, but only insomuch as they violate coherence and result in scrapping tested laws. Physicalism itself is protean, and every researcher who dreams of being a paradigm shifter is essentially hoping to redefine physicalism, perhaps in ways such that it is no longer recognizable.

This gets at the other problem I mentioned, physicalism becoming vacuous. Because if something we considered dualism now turned out to be observable, replicable, and predictable, it seems that it would be incorporated into physicalism.

not just the fortuitous byproducts of a blind watchmaker

I think this is an unfortunate holdover of old school physics. It's distinctly Newtonian. The "clockwork universe," is why physics abandoned classical scale problems for most of a century, and could stick its head in the sand vis-á-vis problems like the inability to do simple things like predict a pendulum's swing, or meaningfully predict the weather. The "chaos revolution," hit academia hard, but left popular notions fairly unchallenged. QM was taken as simply replacing a deterministic clockwork with a stochastic one.

The clockwork model also seems to blind people to the possibilities of top down causality through various levels of emergence. However, when the forces that drove the emergence of human minds result in humans building giant particle accelerators, and bringing forth esoteric particles that do not appear to have existed since the very earliest moments of the universe, it certainly seems to me like top down causality is a thing.

First, the term 'intentionality' as I was intending it, and as it is used in phenomenology, refers to the fact that language, at least a good part of it, is about things. I was not intending to use the term in it's "normal" usage as referring to having intentions.

Second, given the sense of 'intentionality' I was using, whether or not the speaker or author has any intentions regarding what the language they are using is about, the language use is, in itself, about whatever it is about (although of course a recipient competent enough in the given language to be able to understand what it is about is required).

And third, even if computers are able to fool us, that is only on account of the fact that we have created and programmed them well enough to be able to achieve that feat of deceit

Seems I misunderstood. However, I think the same sort of objections would apply on the physicalists' side. You seem to be saying that the Hard Problem has to be solved to account for language, because language use is somehow not fully realized if it isn't being used by conciousness. It can't just have a referent (e.g., a bot selecting specific rows of a SQL database based on a natural language question), it needs some sort of sentient "aboutness" attached to it. I think plenty of people will disagree with that premise.

If you have an ideal Chinese Room, and its behavior, the use of language, is always undistinguishable for any observer, regardless of if the Room has intentionality about the objects of language or not (is a sentient AI versus a bot), what then is the difference? Even from an idealist perspective, I'm not sure there is one that it is possible for us to demonstrate.

Because if all observers see the same thing, regardless of intentionality, then two phenomena share all their traits, and if the Chinese Room is perfect at mimicking language behavior, then the traits of X (the Room) necissarily are the observable traits of Y (the intentional speaker), but then these share an identity and are actually the same thing.

Now I suppose that the argument is that the difference is that in one, our intentional speaker is themselves an observer, whereas in the other there is no observation point. However, the two seem indistinguishable for all other observers, so it is an unsolveable problem. To my mind, this is more indictive of idealism's problems with solipsism than it is a problem for physicalism. Unless idealists have a good method for explaining how to distinguish sentences with intentionality from those without it, they appear in a bind.

Although I suppose idealists could just claim that a Chinese Room can't actually perfectly mimick language behavior. But this counter argument has to rely on claiming that perfect language behavior as seen by other observers is impossible (an increasingly harder bar to meet as AI gets better), because if the claim is that the two aren't the same because one has intentionality and the other doesn't, then their argument is reduced to a tautology and doesn't seem as strong.

Not to mention, many physicalists, particularly non-reductive ones, accept predicate dualism. They fully accept that the physical sciences cannot describe subjective experience qua subjectivity. So what they are really concerned in with when defending physicalism is how non-physical forces can account for things like physical brain damage destroying language capabilities. I have generally not seen good dualist responses to these issues. That people who have recovered from large strokes also describe their subjective experiences being totally dislocated by a physical injury, is also a blow against claims that conciousness only requires the body for physical action. Brain injures and the effects of psychoactive drugs seem to tell us that physical changes in our bodies can absolutely effect our subjective experiences.

Edit: On second thought, I don't even think my own language has intentionality in many cases. When I get stuck on a philosophical question and then my wife starts talking to me about home decor, which is really not my thing, I definitely say words and agree to things like spending a whole day trying to recenter shelves on a wall in plaster, instead of using the studs, without realizing it. If my language had intention, I wouldn't have said that, because putting heavy stuff up in old New England plaster suuuucks, unless you enjoy ripping holes in your wall, and I would have know I was agreeing to do something like that.

Many of the disputes that arise here are the result of the failure to distinguish between the commitment to find physical explanations and the premature assumption that all explanations must be or cannot be physical.

Some claim that consciousness or intelligence is fundamental, but at present we have no way to settle the issue one way or the other. We cannot even come to agreement on terms. What does it mean to be conscious? What counts as evidence of consciousness? It the self-organization of matter an intelligent process? Is the ability to complete complicated tasks an indication of intelligence?

Depending on one's concept of such things one might think it evident that materialism must fail to account for such things. But it is not simply a matter of given an account of things in terms of our concepts but of the adequacy of those concepts themselves.

Some claim that consciousness or intelligence is fundamental, but at present we have no way to settle the issue one way or the other. We cannot even come to agreement on terms. What does it mean to be conscious? What counts as evidence of consciousness? It the self-organization of matter an intelligent process? Is the ability to complete complicated tasks an indication of intelligence? — Fooloso4

Do you see this as a problem for science? If science still has not made progress on these fundamental questions, say, a century from now, do you think people will start questioning the assumption that consciousness can come from matter?

Do you see this as a problem for science? If science still has not made progress on these fundamental questions, say, a century from now, do you think people will start questioning the assumption that consciousness can come from matter? — RogueAI

Progress is being made every day. Consider, for example, advances in understanding the visual and auditory systems. Whether we will have a complete explanation of consciousness in material or physical terms remains to be seen. Let's revisit this question then.

If science still has not made progress on these fundamental questions, say, a century from now, do you think people will start questioning the assumption that consciousness can come from matter? — RogueAI

I know this is not to me but... do facts run to a stopwatch? :wink: What if it takes 200 years? And it isn't just science that hasn't resolved these questions- - there is no agreed upon account outside of science or physicalism either. If we still can't explain consciousness using a superphysical explanation in 100 years, will people start questioning the assumption that consciousness is magic spirit?

Progress on the easy problem is made, sure. On the hard problem? What progress is there? Integrated Information Theory is all the rage, but it's still just that: a theory. Suppose that in 100 years, IIT is still just a theory. 1,000 years? At what point do we start questioning the assumption that consciousness comes from matter?

I know this is not to me but... do facts run to a stopwatch? :wink: What if it takes 200 years? And it isn't just science that hasn't resolved these questions- - there is no agreed upon account outside of science or physicalism either. If we still can't explain consciousness using a superphysical explanation in 100 years, will people start questioning the assumption that consciousness is magic spirit? — Tom Storm

Facts don't run on a stopwatch, but explanations do, to some extent. For the longest time, dark matter was thought to be some type of particular. It still is, but you're seeing more and more people kicking around the idea that it's not a particle. As the failed dark matter experiments pile up, the theory that dark matter isn't a particular becomes more and more popular.

In the case of consciousness, if science can't explain it 1,000 years from now, I fully expect people to have abandoned the assumption that mind comes from matter. It will happen a lot sooner than that.

Progress on the easy problem is made, sure. — RogueAI

Incremental progress can lead to major breakthroughs. I think it is a mistake to draw conclusions one way or another based on the current state the art of cognitive science. It is, after all, a very young science.

I fully expect people to have abandoned the assumption that mind comes from matter. It will happen a lot sooner than that. — RogueAI

Sounds like you are already a believer but I wonder if this is an argument from ignorance at work. Personally I am sympathetic to mysterianism. The question of climate change and other physically understood problems will matter a lot more in this timeframe than resolving the consciousness puzzle. Are you an idealist along Kastrup lines?

Unless idealists have a good method for explaining how to distinguish sentences with intentionality from those without it, they appear in a bind. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You still seem to be misunderstanding what I said. I said that all sentences in coherent form (and maybe even some of those which are not) however they are generated, have intentionality in that a competent hearer or reader will interpret them as being about something. So, whether or not the words are generated intentionally or not is beside the point.

Many of the disputes that arise here are the result of the failure to distinguish between the commitment to find physical explanations and the premature assumption that all explanations must be or cannot be physical. — Fooloso4

The point is that physical explanations cannot substitute for phenomenological explanations, because they are from two very different perspectives. Both have their roles to play in overall understanding.

The point is that physical explanations cannot substitute for phenomenological explanations ... — Janus

That is because we do not have an adequate explanation for either.

Sure, both science and phenomenology are "works in progress". But I'm curious to know what in particular you think is inadequately explained and why.

Also, you seem to be implying that if we had an adequate explanation (for one or the other?) that physical explanations would substitute for phenomenological ones. I see no reason to think that would be the case. In fact I think it is categorially impossible for third person explanations to supplant first person explanations. They are different in kind and perspective.

Oh, gotcha. That seems like the same thing though. The flip side of a perfect Chinese Room is that you ask all the questions in your language. So whether it "knows" what it is hearing, or not, it can generate a response, and if it is good enough, no observer could tell the difference. I'm not sure how this would be different.

At what point do we start questioning the assumption that consciousness comes from matter? — RogueAI

As a matter of scientific method, using the models that have been developed so far is not dependent upon including "materiality" as a prerequisite. The duality in question is presented by the circumstance that our experience of consciousness happens whether it is explained or not while models that explain why it happens are not given but require much effort. The "hard" problem is not difficult because it has to prove that something like "mind" does not exist. It is difficult because the 'duality' of experience is one of the phenomena that has to be explained.

The question of whether any model will sufficiently explain the phenomena is not hanging on the balance of whether a physical or non-physical dimension is involved. The mind/body identity theorists keep changing their models when one set of factors fail to correspond with 'experience' as a fact. Jabbing at one's cranium with an index finger while exclaiming, "It is all in here" is no advance upon the problem.