This goes far to explain a lot of Chinese room situations. We have an intuition for the way something is. That intuition is an unshakeable belief, because it is something that we feel directly. We know what it feels like to understand Chinese (or French, or English, or whatever), and that little homunculus shuffling papers around doesn't feel like it.

Hopefully we have all experienced what genuine inspiration feels like, and we all know that experience. It sure as hell doesn't feel like a massively parallel search algorithm. If anything it probably feels like a bolt of lightning, out of the blue. But here's the thing. If the conscious loop inside your brain is something like the prefrontal cortex, which integrates and controls deeper processing systems outside of conscious reach, then that is exactly what we should expect a search algorithm to feel like. You -- that strange conscious loop I am talking to -- are doing the mapping (framing the problem) and the reducing (recognizing the solution), but not the actual function application and lower level analysis that generated candidate solutions. It feels like something out of the blue, hardly sought for, which fits all the search requirements. Genuine inspiration.

But that's just what it feels like from the inside, to be that recognizing agent that is merely responding to data being fed up to it from the mess of neural connections we call the brain.

You can take this insight a step further, and recognize that many of the things that seem intuitively "obvious" are actually artifacts of how our thinking brains are constructed. The Chinese room and the above comment about inspiration are only examples.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I dislike linking to LessWrong, and to Yudkowsky in particular, but I first picked up on this from an article there, and credit should be given where credit is due: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg...

Fascinating, thank you very much, and agreed on Yudkowsky. It's a bit like crediting Wolfram.