>The idea that scribbles on a paper would be conscious is really hard to believe.
But it's not that the scribbles on paper are conscious; scribbles on paper have no causal powers for example. The scribbles on paper are the volatile storage of this causal chain: the causal cascade flowing through the actions of the person reading the symbols, manipulating them, then writing out new symbols. The bait-and-switch is that when you adjust the thought experiment, the focus shifts from the unified casual process performing certain computations to the inert substrates of the paper (or in the case of the Chinese room, the man performing the computations). But no matter the medium of computation, the causal chains are still instantiated and so there's no reason to think this process is not conscious.
Fair enough, but what makes the instantiation of causal cascade conscious? I see no reason to suppose it would feel pain or see color. What makes it so?
You're looking for a hard cut off where none exists. Most likely everything is conscious on many different levels and scopes of capability.
So the case which makes people really uncomfortable - are cows conscious (because we eat them) has the very unsatisfying answer of "yes, not in the same way we are most likely, but in some way".
There is indeed a lot about the workings of minds that neither I nor anyone else knows, but I do not mistake my lack of knowledge for strong evidence that certain things cannot be so. That would be an example of what Dennett calls the philosopher's syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
It would be like a pre-Archimedean philosopher asserting that iron boats are impossible, because how could they float?
Do you see a reason why a mechanical arrangement of atoms could feel pain or see color? Because they do.
Scribbles of paper serving as a part of a conscious system is indeed an implausible scenario. You'd need a huge number of pieces of paper, interacting in very interesting ways. It's an example specifically designed to be implausible, and so is a very poor guide for intuition.
Why wouldn't it? Supposing that it doesn't presupposes that somewhere along the gradual chain of replacing a human brain with this paper processing system those properties are lost either gradually or abruptly.
Assuming it's the functions the brain performs that are conscious. But it's part of the hard problem. Why and how is anything conscious in the physical world? What does that mean for other physical arrangements? How would we know?
> Assuming it's the functions the brain performs that are conscious.
As far as I know, if you turn off someone's brain functions you also turn off their consciousness. Moreover, consciousness can be manipulated by manipulating the brain. It stands to reason that consciousness is a subset of brain function (and body, sure). But I concede that this is not a rigorous proof of anything. Perhaps the consciousness treats the brain like a comfortable chair, and when it is destroyed gets huffy and leaves to go somewhere else. Seems unlikely though.
> But it's part of the hard problem. Why and how is anything conscious in the physical world? What does that mean for other physical arrangements? How would we know?
Hard to state, perhaps. Hard to answer? I suppose we'll find out once stated whether the question is actually hard to answer.
But it's not that the scribbles on paper are conscious; scribbles on paper have no causal powers for example. The scribbles on paper are the volatile storage of this causal chain: the causal cascade flowing through the actions of the person reading the symbols, manipulating them, then writing out new symbols. The bait-and-switch is that when you adjust the thought experiment, the focus shifts from the unified casual process performing certain computations to the inert substrates of the paper (or in the case of the Chinese room, the man performing the computations). But no matter the medium of computation, the causal chains are still instantiated and so there's no reason to think this process is not conscious.