If we reject physicalism, in favor of analytical idealism, without any evidence or knowledge of the properties of this non-physicalism, or how this non-physicalism operates, are we then devoid of any means of gaining any deeper knowledge? Stuck in a permanent Dark Ages? Some non-material reality of which it is impossible to know any more of?
I think you put it way more succinctly but yes, this is my gripe with it, and any indeterministic claim. It arrests investigation.
Moreso, it arrests investigation specifically into the idea that these two things we have observed, both equally "mysterious" to the person who doesn't understand them, and both capable of reporting some inner experience to an external observer.
Going back to the Chinese room and the way nature dissociates, however, imagine this human in the room like the cell in the body, a neuron.
Well, there are other things there too. There are blood cells that don't even live in the same room as the neuron, maybe just kinda talks to him through the wall of the cell, and the language they have is primitive and newspeak-like, with limited ways to express any concepts and few meaningful concepts besides not pissing off the t-cells.
And even among the neurons, only some of these Chinese rooms each doing only a part of the process, some more working to manufacture pages for the larger book, some to make ink, some to cool food for this Chinese room prison.
Of course at this point the room is more a monastery, but few of the "cells" in it do anything that even could touch the book, and too many of them on top disjointed a manner, too many generals to corrupt enough of them to even move the needle of how the book is operated except to destroy the book itself....
Perhaps there are cliques and social games and bullshit about the monastery. Maybe there are cloisters or wings of the functioning of the book itself, smaller booklets that are consulted with what to do with the primary book, subdivisions of the mind of the room itself existing among the parallel and "insignificant" minds that keep it going, just as the human body this is a metaphor for.
Would you want the monks to start deciding how to interpret the book that is you? Or would such Chinese rooms evolve and develop into the task that keeps them housed in such a way to keep the monks from bothering how the book works?
I have even described how the functioning of this "book" can be made sensitive in ways to the workings of the room, "if the person in the room is hungry, respond this way to that symbol" and food comes in through the door.
This is a simplification, of course. But this kind of connection is more a vote, a measurement, a single numerical signal: it's still something that can be abstracted away with a different drive source, and generally comes from an organized process and detection apparatus.
Somewhere you run into a Chinese room that knows the language of "physics", but the behavior of this room doesn't require more than a mind than the black box itself describes. It's like a box with a perfect robot inside. There's no need to assume a mind inside, but it's still a Chinese room mind, albeit the simplest primitive unit of such in a way that's very difficult to organize into a more useful not-chaotic mind.
It's monist, but not of an emergent sort, rather of a "selective organizational" sort. The "mind/stuff" is always there, and "emergence" of some awareness of something in particular is really created from the separation of awareness from awareness, or in more religious metaphor "the separation of the waters", that what we understand as mind is created from the dissociation of matter from other matter, particles from other particles, and mind from mind.
