Carleas
To my mind you are equating materialism with empiricism. I don’t have any quarrel with empiricism, and to say that a person can be ‘in large part a materialist’ makes no sense to me- it is exactly like saying a person is in ‘large part a monist’; they mostly think there is only one fundamental substance, except for this other one. So understand that we’re using a lot of different terminology, I’ll try to pick my way through it to response as best I can.
The Chinese Room argument makes a point that’s more blunt, and in a slightly different direction, than what I wanted to go for. To answer one of your question, it’s shows that we can’t identify consciousness through output, period. The original formulation of the situation I presented was given to me as a skyscraper, I changed it to a planet for taste. Now, when you say,
That's more or less what a [i]reductio ad absurdum[/i] is, and that's exactly what I'm going for. What I'm saying is that a gigantic consciousness formed by people flipping index cards just-so is completely consistent, and very possible, on materialism- and materialism suffers for it. That is, materialism is damaged by the fact that it leads to such bizarre scenarios and conclusions. I don't think my risen Christ looks so bad by comparison.
I don’t understand why inter-relatedness has any effect. Back to the people with index cards- If these trillion people over here flip their cards just so as a result of responding to each other according to rules, and those trillion people over there flip their cards in exactly the same way through blind chance, are you saying that the first situation would produce conscious thought and the second not? If not, then I think my example with the stars works just fine.
Yes, which is another part of the problem. My index-card mind and your computer mind could easily be played and replayed through certain sequences to reproduce the same instants of conscious thought over and over, or once and never again. That is to say, you could run the ‘remembering last Tuesday’ part of the program alone, and with nothing before it and after it. You would have a conscious mind- conscious in just the way you are- coming into existence long enough to remember last Tuesday, and then being annihilated.
To bring it back to Earth, if you cut out the part of my brain that concerns itself with remembering last Tuesday and throw it in a ditch, then my memory of last Tuesday is in that ditch. If you stimulate it with the right current, then last Tuesday is being remembered in that ditch. That you can have an act of memory without a rememberer is a real problem.