>>54That's ok. Finals over here as well.
These are actually interesting arguments, but to begin with the Right Causal Powers, I'm not sure I completely understand what you're saying. Is there a definition of the term, something I can work with? If it is 'whatever makes the human brain different/sentient', or something similar, then that would be circular reasoning.
Or are these RCP defined as some kind of unknown property of the materials being used? First of all, every material is, at some basic level, the same kind of goo: quarks, leptons, bosons; any property would have to be emergent. I assume that it would have to be some kind of information-processing-related property (I cannot think what else it could be, other than 'magic'/'a soul'). Since you imply that silicon so far doesn't appear have this property, it would have to be something beyond Turing Completeness, which (AFAIK) is not possible. As you say yourself, this is not really an argument against Strong AI. In fact, to me it just sounds like a good bunch of handwaving.
Now, the Internalized Chinese Room is more interesting. Correct me if I'm wrong here; the change from the previous Chinese Room is that this time, there is only the person, who has perfectly memorized the entire rulebook. For some reason, we are now supposed to think that the system (the person working basically as a computer/robot + his perfect memory) cannot be a separate conscious entity by itself. The obvious question is, why not? Computer programs can be layered (e.g. a scripting language, interpreted by an interpreter, which itself is interpreted by the CPU), why shouldn't it be possible to layer consciousnesses? (Ignoring resource constraints of course, since this is a thought experiment.)
From what I found with Google, the argument seems to be based on the idea that the person doesn't understand what he's communicating. I see two flaws here: (1) 'understanding' is not defined, and (2) as outlined above: whatever understanding is, it could very well exist in the system layered on top of (and completely contained in) the person's own consciousness.
>>55fundamental randomness?
Yes; Quantum mechanics, and all that jazz. There are no certainties, only probability distributions. According to some interpretations of QM, "recreating the universe" could lead to it taking a different path the second time around. People tried to restore the determinism by saying that it's just Heisenberg - you disturb what you measure - and that underneath that the universe is ruled by hidden variables. Then this Bell guy came along with his tests and experiments, and mostly rules out the hidden variable theories. Not entirely conclusively though; I'm still in denial.