Comment by levocardia
15 hours ago
Searle had an even stronger version of that belief, though: he believed that a full computational simulation of all of those gazillion inputs, being stimulated in all those manifold ways, would still not be conscious and not have a 'mind' in the human sense. The NYT obituary quotes him comparing a computer simulation of a building fire against the actual building going up in flames.
When I read that analogy, I found it inept. Fire is a well defined physical process. Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.
>Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.
Whooha! If it's not physical what is it? How does something that's not physical interact with the universe and how does the universe interact with it? Where does the energy come from and go? Why would that process not be a physical process like any other?
I'd say understanding and cognition are at this point fully explainable mechanistically. (I am very excited to live in a time where I was able to change my mind on this!)
Where we haven't made any headway on is on the connection between that and subjective experience/qualia. I feel like much of the (in my mind) strange conclusions of the Chinese Room are about that and not really about "pure" cognition.
Simulated fire would burn down simulated building
If everything is simulated then "simulated(x)" is a vacuous predicate & tells you nothing so you might as well throw it away & speak directly in terms of the objects instead of wrapping/prepending everything w/ "simulated".
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That's debatable, but it is also irrelevant, as the key to the argument here is that computation is by definition an abstract and strictly syntactic construct - one that has no objective reality vis-a-vis the physical devices we use to simulate computation and call "computers" - while semantics or intentionality are essential to human intelligence. And no amount of syntax can somehow magically transmute into semantics.
This makes no sense. You could equally make the statement that thought is by definition an abstract and strictly syntactic construct - one that has no objective reality. Neither statement is supported by anything.
There's also no "magic" involved in transmuting syntax into semantics, merely a subjective observer applying semantics to it.
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Do you believe that there are things that are not physical? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And no, "science can't explain x hence metaphysical" is not a valid response.
But that acknowledgement would itself lend Searle's argument credence because much of the brain = computer thesis depends on a fundamental premise that both brains and digital computers realize computation under the same physical constraints; the "physical substrate" doesn't matter (and that there is necessarily nothing special about biophysical systems beyond computational or resource complexity) (the same thinking by the way, leads to arguments that an abacus and a computer are essentially "the same"—really at root these are all fallacies of unwarranted/extremist abstraction/reductionism)
The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.
Unless you can show an example of how we can compute something that is not Turing computable, there is no justification for the inverse, as the inverse would require something in the brain to be capable of interactions that can not be simulated. And we've no evidence to suggest either that the brain can do something not Turing computable or of the presence of something in the brain that can't be simulated.
Maybe consciousness is exactly like simulated fire. It does a lot inside the simulation, but is nothing on the outside.
> The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.
And something that often happens whenever some phenomenon falls under scientific investigation, like mechanical force or hydraulics or electricity or quantum mechanics or whatever.
Roger Penrose would be another.
Isn't that besides the point? The point is that something would actually burn down.
GP's point is that buring something down is by definition something that requires a specific physical process. It's not obvious that thinking is the same. So when someone says something like "just as a simulation of fire isn't the same as an actual fire (in a very important way!), a simulation of thinking isn't the same as actual thinking" they're arguing circularly, having already accepted their conclusion that both acts necessarily require a specific physical process. Daniel Dennett called this sort of argument an "intuition pump", which relies on a misleading but intuitive analogy to get you to accept an otherwise-difficult-to-prove conclusion.
To be fair to Searle, I don't think he advanced this as an agument, but more of an illustration of his belief that thinking was indeed a physical process specific to brains.
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https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html