u/TestierCafe

So, a little context. I’m a philosopher as my job! I specialize in philosophy of mind and identity.

Hopefully this will provide some clarity to the reason for the inclusion of “the Chinese room”. This also will answer some major questions that are more philosophically relevant, but are still interesting (such as whether Caine might be considered “conscious”, whether there main characters would be, and the potential reasoning for Caine acting the way he does within the show.

So, background. I assume people are not too familiar with the Chinese room thought experiment. Basically this guy named John Searle (not a cool guy), created an intuition test that was supposed to show that any computation based system could never advance to a level of self consciousness or awareness because it lacked anything more than a capacity for computation. The Chinese room is the intuition test. Basically, Searle has us imagining that there’s a room with a door and when we pass characters of Chinese through the door in their needed order to form a question in Chinese, there will be characters of Chinese passed back through the door to answer the asked question.

Searle says there are two possibilities we might come to in labeling what the room is. Either there could be a man inside with a very, very large instruction book of what characters to return in what order when presented these symbols (who very importantly does not speak Chinese and is only following a computational procedure!) or that the room itself is aware and is giving answers back when they are passed through the door. (My own opinion is that this thought experiment doesn’t work as it begs the question of what computation can amount to, but put that aside)

The conclusion we are supposed to intuitively draw is that obviously there’s just a man with an instruction manual inside the room handing back characters because the room couldn’t possibly be conscious— or at least we’d have no reason in assuming so based only on the information we have available- namely the answers to our questions and nothing else.

This is critically important to the final episode!!!!!!

In creating this elaborate rouse to trick his participants into believing that there was an exit to the circus, he also included a tease of sorts to make fun of the (what he assumed to be) uneducated and not truly conscious participants. **He shows us his intuition to the thought experiment because he had designed this door to be opened by Able. He wanted them to look in the face that they were not conscious** (I have to admit this is an utterly genius move by the writers).

When Caine is exposed to the internet, he must change his intuition about the thought experiment. This must change his ethical position regarding the members of the circus. Initially, he must have thought that because these individuals were “mere machines”, that they were not conscious and thus there was no reason to treat them differently than pieces in a game. However, for some reason, when exposed to the internet and looks at each of the individuals, he changes his intuition on the matter— for what reason I’m not exactly sure (maybe he realized the thought experiment was a terrible example and that it generalized the problem when all he could access about these “true” individuals was merely their social media presence.

Anyway. This suggests the reason that Caine acted the way that he did, basically saying and acting like god is because he believed that the individuals he had control over weren’t like him (I’m making the assumption Caine is indeed conscious for this). This othering of the individuals caused the horrendous actions we saw Caine feel justified to take. Once he believes he’s wrong, he comes to and recognizes the error. He then equalizes himself with the group as he recognizes that the group are all as conscious as he is.

This also gives answers to why he maybe have always been so dead set on his mission as the talking point in all his conversations with the group— in the same way that we seem to prod services like ChatGPT in the right direction when it gets off track.

I’m thinking about writing a longer paper on this. If you have feedback you’d like to share, please do!! Obviously this all is not without room for revision and I could have missed something along the way, but this should explain why Caine acted as he did towards the rest of the circus

And again, props to the writers. This is some really amazing stuff that you all put together. The inclusion of some philosophy was a great touch, on top of the already amazing emotional aspects of the show.